Solo album from Andrew Chalk, self-released in an edition of 500 copies with stunning hard card screened sleeve. Sounding quite unlike anything Andrew has done before - yet in someway essentially ‘the same' - Blue Eyes Of The March is a heartbreaking, highly atmospheric setting for solo piano works, all drenched in a sad slow-motion fog of reverb and delay that makes them sound like the final corporeal form of dreams slowly spooling to their end. Two tracks, the first of which is so smothered in a reverie of F/X that it sounds more like a guitar with hundred mile strings than any piano. Absolutely beautiful, one of Andrew's most delicate, poetic and emotionally affecting works to date. Highest recommendation.

Lovingly packaged in heavy duty hard card gatefold sleeves with paste-on inners and textured original art, East Of The Sun is the latest release on Andrew Chalk's own Faraway Press imprint and another fantastic addition to what has got to be one of the most consistently dazzling label runs of the past few years. This one bundles material originally recorded 1993-94 and assembled/mixed at ICR Studios by Colin Potter. The sound reflects more on earlier Chalk sides, with that smoky grey/glass drone sound moving in slow bass blooms and ripples of thick, time-killing vibration all rendered like a slow pan through desolate, long-abandoned cities. Beautiful, emotionally pregnant narcolepsy that you could wander through for days. Highly recommended.

Beautiful album from Andrew Chalk’s partner and collaborator, Vikki Jackman, packaged in the usual jaw-dropping hand-made style from Faraway Press. This is another set of luminous, smeared/treated piano works evocative of various dream states, reveries and forgotten memories while building haunting compositions from a drift of notes, subtle field recordings and odd sonic stylings. This has a more ‘new age’ feel than her previous release, with a slow-motion take on Kosmiche keyboard drone that is supremely affecting alongside aspects of the quietest Haino/Mazzacane sides as well as the classic Mirror albums. Highly recommended.

New album from these two regular UK underground collaborators. Holloway plays piano, wooden flute and sea recordings while Tate plays squeeze-box, guitar and percussion. Slow symphonic psychedelic drone sunk deep inside hallucinatory environments.

Deluxe CD reissue in hand-made card slipcases of this classic LP: A new solo Andrew Chalk album is always an event at VT but when it’s as jaw-droppingly beautiful as The Cable House it’s a contender for album of the year. The music is drawn from an emotionally high-wire recording session that took place in 2008 with Chalk generating a number of sound environments using electronically treated piano. Chalk’s playing is stately, slow and extremely poignant, with tiny melodic phrases falling like cherry blossoms into pools of pale reverb and broken up, overloaded tape. At points some of the music recalls William Basinski’s haunting Disintegration Loops, at others the music of Christina Carter at her most heavenly or Fripp and Eno’s unreleased album of early music tape work. Right now, with autumn breaking into winter and the trees left bare and the orange streetlights and the dark nights, The Cable House feels like the perfect soundtrack. The first section is made up of five shorter tracks that suspend single notes in lugubrious tape treatments and subtle sonic dislocations while the last track is an extended epic that further dilates the sounds and ups the emotional ante. Mesmerising, profoundly sad, a classic recording from the UK master of out-of-focus drone poetry. Highly recommended.

In what might be the greatest international drone summit to date Andrew Chalk and Timo Van Luijk, two of the most forward-thinking slow-motion instrumentalists, have launched a new group project, Elodie, that features guest appearances from both Daisuke Suzuki and Ian Middleton. Chalk and Van Luijk have a long history together, both at one point playing as members of Mirror. With Elodie their focus is on combining landscape soundings and hazily rendered arcs of melody with actual small instrumentation, strings, music boxes, acoustic guitars etc... Parts of this come across as the most pastoral songwriter side that Andrew has ever been involved in and it’s all the more bewitching for it. Here Van Luijk plays the Nick Drake to Chalk’s Joe Boyd, re-imagining “Way To Blue” as a psycho-spatial investigation of the endless hues on the way to dawn with heavenly choirs of bird song over rolling acoustic guitar that could almost be taken straight from the legendary Hawaiian 1973 acid folk masterpiece, These Trails, or even the music of Harry Partch. There are shorter tracks that feel like snippets of eternal music, sudden streams of bagpipe tone or Cro-Magnon court music that comes over like The Third Ear Band, but the overall feel is wide-open, pastoral. This is folk-based drone that succeeds in joining the dots between traditional rural forms and future-visioned kosmische with a gentle, celebratory aspect that is pure Chalk. Edition of 400 copies. Just fantastic, highly recommended!

Brand new edition of this stunning solo album from Andrew Chalk's partner Vikki Jackman, a reissue of the ultra-limited LP that came out a few years ago and instantly disappeared into the deep pockets of Japanese collectors. Jackman's delicate piano playing has appeared on previous Mirror and Andrew Chalk releases but given the space of a whole disc to spread out on, she has created a beautiful, melancholic, deeply personal piano album, combining single notes that fall like baubles of rain with clusters of music box melodies and the kind of endlessly deep drones that feel as if they are drawn straight out of the past. Absolutely beautiful and up there with Goldfall, Nights and Shadows From The Album Skies as one of the best releases to come out of this particular cabal. Highly recommended.

Inspired 25^th anniversary reissue of one of the all-time oddball UK Industrial/experimental classics, Mixed Band Philanthropists’s legendary The Impossible Humane. MBP was a pseudonym for Richard Rupenus of The New Blockaders and pals who put to together this insane LP with the help of a bunch of cassette contributions from a veritable who’s-who of DIY/avant gods. MBP then dredge the whole thing through several layers of impossible aural logic until you have one of the most spectacularly grid-locked and obsessively dense sides of scattershot/ plunderphonic noise/drone never released by United Dairies. Includes appearances from Nurse With Wound, Andrew Chalk, Nihilist Assault Group, The New Blockaders, Organum, Asmus Tietchens, Smegma, Tom Recchion, Merzbow, The Haters, Giancarlo Toniutti, HNAS, P16.D4, Vortex Campaign and more. Something about this set really suits the cassette format too. Recommended. 

Excellent follow-up to the duo of Andrew Chalk and Timo Van Luijk’s recent Echos Pastoraux LP, in gorgeous handmade sleeves by Chalk. Elodie is more instrumentally focussed and varied than the bulk of Chalk’s solo drone work, creating beautiful melancholy miniatures from combinations of piano, guitar, bells, music boxes and reeds. Parts of this set remind me of Loren Connors and Suzanne Langille’s Come Night album, particularly the lucid settings of Venusian guitar and the breathy saxophone but cut with the alien atmospherics of the great Steve Lacy/Yuji Takahashi/Takehisa Kosugi album Distant Voices. Indeed, this is the closest Chalk has come to cutting a dreamtime acid folk record, with an atmosphere that is somewhere between Joe Boyd’s Witchseason productions and some of the more pastoral Kosmische Musik sides. And when they do trip over into all-out drone - the instruments subtly smeared and now singing to themselves - the effect is uniquely otherworldly. Highly recommended.