Philip Corner

After a very long hiatus following various accidents, injuries and illnesses Quiet World is finally back in the game with our newest release by the incomparable Philip Corner.

'Gong/Ear:Natura' is a set of recordings dating from 1995 of Philip interacting with two locations (an orchard and a courtyard) with gong and assorted other less immediately identifiable sound sources (there's definitely a drink being slurped during 'Courtyard').

The recordings were made using a Sony Walkman and a Sennheiser microphone and so are quite noisy in places.  They've been cleaned up a little but we kept it light so as not to lose the spontaneity and the very nature of the recordings.

The album has been released on CDr and as a download and can be found here...

Phoebe, Rhodri, Philip, David, Ian, Jenn (photo by Daryl Feehely)

 Philip and his partner Phoebe Neville recently visited Swansea as part of Nawr at the Swansea International Festival and performed two concerts in the town. I was honoured to have been asked to perform with them at the first of these, 'Metal Meditations', alongside Rhodri Davies, Jenn Kirby and David Pitt.

When I first moved to Swansea in 1994 one of the first places I visited was The Mission Gallery and immediately fell in love with the place (in particular it's acoustics) so to finally get to play there - especially playing Philip's fabulous score on David's fantastic gong collection with five amazing musicians in front of an appreciative audience - was a dream come true and they were fantastic hosts.

We were hoping to have the new album available for the concert but a series of broken promises by the printers meant the discs didn't arrive in time.  Instead I spent the afternoon hand making copies of the album using blank discs, card and coloured cases that I had around the house; I managed to make 16 (8 purple and 8 blue) before my printer ran out of ink.  Each disc was signed by Philip with 6 being shared with the performers and the rest offered for sale.  We still have a few of the blue left - purple proved very popular - and these will be put up for sale at a future date

The second concert was at the Swansea Studios and featured a selection of Philip's works performed by the trio of Philip, Phoebe and Rhodri.  Each piece was wonderful but for me it was the physicality of opener 'Piano Movement' and the delicate and beautiful 'Petali Pianissimo' that stole the show.

Huge kudos must go to Rhodri for organising these concerts (and the other two in the series) and a massive thanks to Philip and Phoebe for making the journey. 

Strange Orbits

Back in 2006, under my old 'Psychic Space Invasion' name, I released an album called 'Pendulum' (click the name to hear / buy it).  It was made over the course of a weekend in the back room of my flat whilst watching the snow fall on Swansea.  It was made using layers of short loops I'd made from various sources that I overlaid and overlapped.

A couple of months later I started working on more loop pieces which when finished - with one exception that appeared on a very small run compilation on the Anima Mal Nata label - sat on the hard-drive of my computer whilst I got distracted by other things.  And there it remained.

Until today.

Today I was playing around with the logo I'd made for The British Space Group - that one up there ^ and realised that it seemed to fit with the long neglected album so here it is; seeing the light for the first time in 8 years is my 'new' loop album, 'Strange Orbits'.

It's a lot more intensely psychedelic experience than 'Eyes Turned Skyward' but after spending the last 8 weeks pretty much trapped indoors thanks to having split my tibia in half that's pretty much how I feel.

This one is going to be digital only (unless I change my mind) and for those of you wondering about them, lots of my tunes start off their lives with nonsense words for titles just in the case of 'Pendulum' and now 'Strange Orbits' the titles stay that way.

Hope you enjoy.

Ian

The British Space Group

So after taking quite a long time out to recharge, refocus and reinvigorate I have today launched the digital copy (CDs to follow) of the first album by my new project The British Space Group.

The album - Eyes Turned Skyward - is a deliberate (but not huge) step away from the more post-industrial musique concrete style music that I've been making of late.  It's more in the spirit of the more synth driven albums I produced in a mad scramble a few years ago such as Pendulum, All Gods Children Got Space and Phantasms I & II.

The new identity is an attempt to create a home for this side of what I like to make that is distinct from the other music.  It's certainly not going to replace it - expect the long delayed Aurarora album to be available before the end of the summer - but is something I'm thoroughly enjoying playing with at the moment.

Digital only at the moment due to a delay with the CDs but they will hopefully be available by the end of next week.

Hope you like it.

that post-Autumnal feeling

Out today is the first of two new releases on Quiet World; 'The World After Autumn' by me.

I've been slowly piecing this one together for quite a while.  The album's longest track ' The Daughter of the Sea and Me'  is layer upon layer upon layer of sounds and took over a year to get to the point where I was happy with the mix.
In a way it's almost a follow up to the 'Simple Ghosts...' album I made with Rhod and Steve the other year in that it's almost entirely acoustic and is very much a product of my various environments with sounds sourced from my garden, my classroom, one of the local beaches and of course my cramped and cluttered studyo (part study / part studio).

It's available on CDR in the usual very limited signed and numbered edition of 50 from www.quietworld.co.uk or as a download from the Bandcamp link at the bottom of this post.

i hope you like it.

i am elsewhere

and there is music

The siren call of sleep

 About a year ago I was honoured to release a frankly beautiful album of Eric Satie pieces as interpreted by Susan Matthews.  I'd been listening to her music (via Wonderful Wooden Reasons) or some time and when at the beginning of 2012 I decided to reboot Quiet World and start featuring a wider variety of people she was one of the first people I asked.  Even though she only lived a half hours journey away we had never met and indeed only did so when she moved slightly further away.  We now meet up semi-regularly for delicious food and chat at a nice little vegetarian cafe in Carmarthen.

Well, this week she has very kindly released one of my releases - Somnia - on her own Siren Wire label.  It's a deep and dark soundscape piece that is an evocation of sleep and dream.  As a borderline insomniac I have a love / hate relationship with sleep.  I find it frustrating as it's often slightly out of reach and so when I finally hit a point where sleep is easily attainable I sleep too deeply for the dreams to surface with me leaving them as vague and indistinct sensations that can then colour the rest of day.

Somnia is an interpretation of this; the flashes of emotion, the spasms of recollection, the glimpses of essence and the phantasms of memory.

“What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.”
Werner Herzog

 

Spreading the Love...Intergalactically

every now and again - roughly once a year - I get the urge to do something with a beat.  It's an urge that goes away fairly quickly but it happens so rarely that I tend to jump on it when it happens.  Today was the day that the urge hit.  I really should have been marking essays (and indeed am) but it was nice to take a break for an hour or two and run with an idea. 

Because these things are generally so different from the things I usually do and because when I did the first one I was obviously in a fairly silly mood and named myself as 'The Interplanetary Love Orchestra' I've continued to do so.

Anyway here's the new one.  Hope you like it.

and here are the older ones...