Atmospheric new collection of field recordings, installations and area sonorities from Moniek Darge, all captured on the island of Crete and released by Graham Lambkin: "Kye is pleased to announce the release of Crete Soundies, the major new work by Moniek Darge, and the follow-up to last years Soundies (1980-2001) CD. Crete Soundies presents three new pieces -- Magnesia (2006), Anemos (2007) and East Crete (2008-2009). These works were born from two years of Levka Ori sound research, and an additional year in east Crete in collaboration with fellow sound artist Francoise Vanhecke. Moniek Darge was born in Bruges, 1952 and studied music theory and violin at the Music Conservatory of Bruges, painting at the Ghent Royal Academy of Fine Arts; Art History, Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Ghent, Belgium. She is active as composer, violinist, performer and audio artist and has built light and soundsculptures, installations, musical instruments and for many years has been constructing a series of alternative music boxes, with which she also performs. Darge has specialised in both soundscapes and live-art performances in which visual and musical aspects are combined and in interactional improvisation on violin. Since 1970 she has performed around the world and has been active on stage, first with the Logos Ensemble, then with Logos Duo (together with Godfired-Willem Raes), and more recently with the M&M robot ensemble. She also founded Logos Women, a small group specialised in intermedia improvisations performing their own compositions for various instruments, voices and music boxes. Crete Soundies comes housed in 6-panel digipak, in an edition of 500, and is released with the support of the Flemish Government." - KYE.

It’s interesting to note the way that The Shadow Ring – in common with Whitehouse – became increasingly obsessed and – yes – perverted by language as their careers progressed. By the time of the strange, melancholy later Shadow Ring albums – Lighthouse, Lindus, I’m Some Songs - the earlier surrealist narratives were gradually being replaced by a discomfited Sebaldian grey and a focus more on word as sound and sound beyond meaning. Like Whitehouse they began to deliberately manipulate syntax and sense, corrupting words and smearing tones in order to illicit less defined reactions in the listener while moving further away from ‘vocals’ altogether. In many ways Elklink – the duo of The Shadow Ring’s Graham Lambkin and Adris Hoyos of Harry Pussy – take this tendency to its very extreme.
Last time I encountered Elklink they were being introduced by Heather Leigh at the legendary Brattleboro Free Folk Fest, with Lambkin and Hoyos accompanied by Matt Krefting of Son Of Earth and Scott Foust of Idea Fire Company et al. It’s not often remembered or remarked upon that Elklink played the fest but then their performance was so confusing, so defiantly arch – Foust grated carrots for most of the performance while wearing a trademark orange jump suit, Krefting sat on the floor and played cassettes, Adris faced away from the audience and played a single cymbal – that it doesn’t quite fit the overarching free folk aesthetic that was the festival’s main conceptual thrust. Now, this, a vinyl reissue in an edition of only 500 copies – inevitably immediately sold out at source – that restores their elusive cassette on Polyamory (James Toth’s aka Wand’s great early imprint) from 1999 alongside their contribution to the Colour In Absence Sound compilation from the same year. Recorded at the same time as The Shadow Ring’s Lindus, The Rise Of Elklink magnifies and implodes the early narrative style of The Shadow Ring with a heavy air of suburban ennui somehow transformed into a series of ghostly transports that move well beyond simple sound poetry and into a form of composition that is intimately tied up with the body and the space around it, forsaking the formal satisfaction of poetry and ‘sense’ for a sound with endless subliminal depth, rich with an almost occult sense of implication, suggestion and otherworldly power. Recorded at home straight to four track the songs are accumulations of variously treated monologues and sounds that dissolve into rich miasmic fields of chatter and non-specific drone/environments in a way that owes as much to the work of Robert Ashley and Walter Marchetti as it does to Michigan noise. Indeed, the degree of acoustic/electric confusion is immediately disorientating, as body sounds break down into machine patterns, extraneous domestic sounds take on the form of voices and microphones record the speech of empty rooms. The atmosphere is similar to Whitehouse at points, though paradoxically enough it’s the early Come Org recordings that it most resembles, where Bennett’s vocals were almost impossible to fully decode. The generally malevolent air – which the deliberate breakdown of sense inevitably seems to conjure – also brings to mind the darker Nurse With Wound material like “I Was No Longer His Dominant” or “Fashioned To A Device Behind A Tree” although a more contemporary reference might be the amazingly disquieting series of recordings released by Relay For Death over the past year or so. And of course it has an umbilical straight to the profoundly alienated lost-in-the-fog aspect of the last few Shadow Ring recordings. With a guest appearance from The Shadow Ring’s Tim Goss and some absolutely gripping performances from Adris and Graham, trading vocals, blurring roles until each seem to be a degraded reflection of each other, this is one of the most remarkable, disturbing, impenetrably deep broadcasts from some of the key figures in contemporary underground music. File it alongside Lindus, Put My Dream On This Planet, Total Sex, Automatic Writing, Let’s Build A Pussy, Crowley’s cylinder recordings and Coil’s ELpH workings in the part of your collection reserved for modern classics. Highly recommended!

Stunning new duo drone set from two masters of the form, Marcia Bassett of Double Leopards/Zaimph/Hototogisu et al and Samara Lubelski of Hall Of Fame, Tower Recordings etc. Although Lubelski is best known as a singer-songwriter with a 60s Euro bent through the solo sides she has cut for De Stijl her sole COM recording, In The Valley, later reissued on vinyl by Eclipse, remains a classic of extended string drone. Two side-long pieces see the duo work guitar and violin into eerie slow-motion architectures. Lubelski has mastered that lucid, post-Takehisa Kosugi/Taj Mahal Travellers style w/aspects of Bill Breeze and John Cale, working arcs of uncannily speech-like violin drone into Bassett’s ascending feedback sculptures. There’s an occult/modal aspect to the interaction that gives it a heady ritualistic aspect, the feel of slow sunrises in distant galaxies that seems to tie it in with several decades worth of higher-minded drone research coming out of New York’s Lower East Side. Way beyond a standard issue ‘drone’ side, this is a reminder of just how powerful long, suspended tones can be in the hands of master levitators. On Graham Lambkin’s Kye label in an edition of 500 copies. Recommended. 

Vinyl issue – a co-release between Graham Lambkin’s Kye imprint and Penultimate Press – of what was originally a very obscure cassette release from Fluxus artist/musician/conceptualist Henning Christiansen in 1990. Kreuzmusik Fluxid Behandlung Op 189 is a highly ritualised sound/performance involving a turntable that plays stones, violently treated and F/X damaged vocals, hypnotic/zoned percussion and moments of odd low-level noise. It was originally commissioned by the Bonner Kunstverein Gallery, Kunstfond, Germany in August 1989, for inclusion in their Taking Fluxus Around for a Drive happening, an action that also featured performances by Dieter Daniels, George Maciunas, Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen and Joe Jones. Great to have this dazzling performance on wax: “In 1967 Joseph Beuys and I travelled to Darmstadt for a performance of HAUPTSTROM FLUXUS from 1:00 -11:00pm (10 hours) on the 20th March. HAUPTSTROM was basically a new ritual, which is how a lot of people saw it at the time, and later on too. Beuys used his own body as a deeply primal human language, and I made 10 hours of ritual music using a number of tape recorders. And obviously we wanted to make a completely new space for HAUPTSTROM. The space at Franz Dahlem's at 7 AHA street was small and there was even less space for the rather large audience because Beuys made a roughly 7cm high rampart of margarine around his own performance space; and my main motif was a knocking sound, like the sound of a heart beating, which I used to create peace in the space, separate from the other more energetic sound-music passages. When I got the invitation for Taking Fluxus Around for a Drive I immediately remembered that Darmstadt exhibition in 1967. It's not all that far from Denmark, 150 km to Bonn-Darmstadt, but a timespan of 22 years. I thought of Jörg Immendorf's LIDL-Bundestag, which you could say landed in the roses outside the real Bundestag. This poetic, political act impressed me at the time, because it showed that our world could basically be quite different. I decided straight away that I wanted to make Kreuzmusik, and I was also sure that no other Fluxus people would come up with the same idea. Most of my Fluxus friends go for Homo Ludens and that's fine, but I wanted to feel the intimacy again in a small space, I wanted to make a Scandinavian ritual in FLUXID BEHANDLUNG. I took my Stone Age Gramophone (which really does play stones) called my friend Ernst Ludwig Kretzer from Hamburg and arranged with him that he would operate a time delay on my tapes and voice so that I could ritualise freely. In Kunstfond I didn't make a mound of margarine - of course not - instead I made one from flour (bread), in the middle of this was the Stone Age Gramophone and hanging on the wall there were strange crosses, made out of socks and clothes hangers; as well as this there was a headless figure of Christ and a toy Cessna plane in a little canary cage. I began with my piece Io Am En Vogel as a 'starter' (about 20 minutes), then I performed Zum Preis des Fluxus, which had been my contribution to the Wiesbaden Fluxus 82 catalogue, then I threw green stones into a bucket of water, then to the accompaniment of the EURASIENSTAB -fluxorum organum music I played a green cutting sheet that was hanging on my chest, then to EUROPEAN ZEN I played 3 glass bowls with red sticks, the bells and knocking für Das alte Russland (for Old Russia). Then everything went dark and I lit candles while my deep GROUNDNOTE played. After 5 minutes played the lights came on again and my GROUNDNOTE led into the sheep composition (sheep instead of fiddles); I used my green fat-fiddle to make little twittering sounds; for me, sheep mean peace and insight. This soundworld then lead into the composition with 180 hammer blows against war monkeys. I hammered very sharply and powerfully. Beuys once wrote a piece with the title: Der dumme Hammer tritt auf (The Stupid Hammer Performs), that's how it should be - against the war monkeys, logical. This sequence then finally lead into peaceful bird twitterings in a piece that I call Die Freiheit ist um die Ecke (Freedom is Around the Corner). During this I slowly immersed the Cesna plane inside the canary cage in a tub of water , after I had flown around in my own space for a while. And that was the end of the whole seance. It lasted over an hour." - Henning Christiansen. Edition of 500 copies with full-colour reproductive score. Highly recommended!