Peru, February 2017

January SAD toppled me this year. A number of incidents involving the intimate nature of teeth became altogether too agonising to bear. So I decided to visit some OLD friends in the Amazon. Some older than I realised. Energetic work with Ayahuasca and Noya Roa under the guidance of Manuel Mahua, Papa Gilberto Mahua and Oscar Rodriguez Reategui in Pucallpa.

Tasting the tears of stars that fruit the fallen trees. Thinking about Milarepa, the art of listening and the development of LUNG-GOM-PA. The awakening of living spirit.

"Home is where all your attempts to escape cease." - Naguib Mahfouz

The restoration of sight. The little machines on another frequency, tirelessly working to repair the damage done and not yet done. The suffering inseparable from joy. The luminous ape in the library of everything. 

The finger pointing at the star is not the star. Resistance to the dropping of the body. Holding breath so very tight. 

Home. The heaving, seething, perpetual blush. The groaning, birthing belonging.

Carried away in play. Lost in recognition. The fibres aligning only to become prideful. The grasping. Let go to nurture. The nature of providing is the practice of release.

Tavener's Magnificat. Band On The Run. Rhythm Of The Saints.

This time I would listen. I would make myself confortable and let her work on me. The astral hospital bed. 

Fanning, combing, inverting. Gondolier of the neural canals. Breathing the prism. Fireflies dimming the grey skinned, fingerless imp. In dark slumber.

The spinning helix, the jealous lover, the trickster. Naughty, clingy Mary Mary.

Watercolours as offerings. Staving off starving.

She made her voice known to me. Distinguishable from the others. To be a child.

The parent of the self. The dilating diaphragm. The pockets of breath between vertebrae. A childish Pieta. 

Friends you lost to objects they cultivate a ghost in the stuffed and the glass eyes and paint.

Traveller of the arteries. Navigator of hidden realms.

Baptismal submersion. Spitting perfume. The crown and the fingers. 

Arcana. The shell is a perfect, purple cell. The song where everyone nuance contains a new lesson, another curvature in the undiscoverable sphere.

Don't be shy. Be flexible. Don't interrupt. 

We were all children. We knew not.

The woman of the stars, the man of the roots. The behaviour of the observed is affected by the observer - on this we can all agree.

My home. Her final transmission. "You don't have to make any big decisions yet my son."

Service. Gratitude. Patience. Forgiveness.

The Honourable Daines Barrington /// Moscow, December 2016

JELLY III

Third epidose of JELLY ON YOUR SHOULDER on Soho Radio. Devoted to the eternal spirit of sound and deep listening. Transmitting mashups of Pauline Oliveros in imaginal Tuva, People Like Us vs John Tavener, Kraftwerk vs Charlemagne Palestine, Toru Takemitsu (dreamweapon mix), Plastikman vs Phill Niblock, Coil vs David Crosby, Neon Sardinia, Little Jimmy Scott in dub and more.

///O\\\

Mothlite /// Donald McPherson split 7" on End Of The Alphabet

New Mothlite tune "Thumb On The Vine" lathe cut 7" on NZ label End Of The Alphabet split with South Island guitar hero Donald McPherson. They're all gone but you can listen/buy the digital on bandcamp.

https://endofthealphabetrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-land-behind-the-door-thumb-on-the-vine

JELLY ON YOUR SHOULDER - EPIDOSE II

Now streaming the second instalment of our Soho Radio transmission. Heavy aureole from Ex-Easter Island Head, Psychic TV, The Trees Community, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Shirley Collins, Dr. Chittibabu, Steve Moore, Lungfish, I Roy, a duet that never happened between Cosey Fanni Tutti & Don Cherry, etcetera.

JELLY ON YOUR SHOULDER

STREAM THE FIRST EPIDOSE OF MY SOHO RADIO TRANSMISSION JELLY ON YOUR SHOULDER. ENTER THE CENTRE OF A MONDAY AFTERNOON.

\\\ H A Z E L ///

The fifth Æthenor album is upon us. Her moon is liquid. Conceived amidst haze. Italia MMX.

Hazel is the 5th record from this group of eclectic travellers, who bring their considerable pedigrees together in unexpected and original ways. Looking at the people involved, it would be reasonable to expect a massive blowout of sound, but everyone plays with remarkable and effective restraint. The music is atmospheric and layered, with bits and pieces of identifiable rock moves peeking out from under a thick blanket of hard-to-identify drift. Based on live recordings made on a lengthy tour of Italy in 2010, the recordings have been extensively edited and supplemented, but without losing the elemental sound of a group playing live together. While there’s plenty of weird ambient sound to be heard, this isn’t a sound-effects/”pedalboard” record. Like the preceding “En Form for Bla” album, Noble’s drums anchor the music. The drumming is spare and considered, sometimes lashing out with abstract punctuation, and other times laying out a Can-like groove. O’Malley’s guitar is also restrained, providing a bed for O'Sullivan's constantly morphing Rhodes, synths and electronic effects. Kristoffer Rygg contributes a rousing vocal incantation to “Ermanna” and peppers the mix with ghostly modular details. Like their other records, this is not really like anything else out there right now. Sleeve designed by Stephen O’Malley. CD is in card folio printed by Stumptown Printers. LP is in Stoughton Tip-On Jacket, pressed at RTI, and includes download card.

Pre-order HERE.
 

\\\ F U R F O U R ///

LP version pressed on virgin vinyl and packaged with artworked inner sleeve and free download coupon. First 300 LPs pressed on translucent green vinyl. CD version in 4 panel mini-LP style gatefold package. OUT ON THRILL JOCKEY RECORDS, September 22nd 2016.

Somewhere, in the still-remaining quiet places of London, Grumbling Fur is at work. This being is the joint manifestation of Alexander Tucker and Daniel O’Sullivan which, since 2011, has birthed a series of increasingly focussed albums of psychedelic pop. Their new album, Furfour, is a record that’s the sum of a dizzying array of creative projects by two key figures in an esoteric underground still thriving despite the pressures and pains of modern London.

Furfour gradually emerged over three years of writing and recording at 147 Tower Gardens, the strange ivy-shrouded house that Tucker and O’Sullivan once called home. It’s an album whose warm heart is shaped, say Grumbling Fur, by birth, loss, friendship, death, those things that happen to us all. Yet as ever with this duo, it’s altered through fantasy and sci-fi, Carlos Castenada, shamanic mind warp, house ghosts and meditation.

It’s in many ways remarkable that two such distinct personalities with their roots and much of their activity in the cultural left eld can combine in a record that sounds so rooted, focussed, and accessible. 2016 is a already a year of intense activity for Tucker and O’Sullivan outside of Grumbling Fur: Tucker’s latest comic was featured in Art Review, a full publication, World In The Force, will follow on Breakdown Press, along with a new solo album. O’Sullivan has been at the core of the wildly successful This Heat reconstitution, and with Massimo Pupillo of Zu recently released Laniakea. As part of Ulver, he released ATGCLVLSSCAP, an pan-zodiacal excursion in sound, and later this year there’ll be a new album from Æthenor (a collaboration between O’Sullivan, Steve Noble and Stephen O’Malley). In the guise of the Grumbling Fur Time Machine Orchestra, Tucker and O’Sullivan have just released a 12” of ROSE, their collaborative piece with Turner Prize-nominee Mark Titchner, who in turn produced the artwork for Furfour. There’ve also been a series of live collaborations with Charlemagne Palestine.

This breadth of operation frees O’Sullivan and Tucker to create simple, hypnotically engaging songs from paradoxically freeform beginnings. Shaping the lot are their long-standing shared musical affections, a polyglot music encompassing orchestrated poptones, collage, dub and beat-making as well as experimental and drone elements: touchtones might include Faust, Arthur Russell, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Moondog, Michael Nyman, Gate, Syd Barrett, Stereolab, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Ashtray Navigations, Cc Hennix and Madlib. The 12 songs and interstitial abstract pieces that make up Furfour were created not out of structure or theme, and rarely began at the beginning. Instead, Grumbling Fur work by generating sounds and ideas first and then moulding structures and ideas around this. “Songs are about including the process in the finished piece and spontaneous ideas are laid down and a structure starts to emerge from this source,” they explain: “first thought best thought is our motto”.

On Furfour, Grumbling Fur is joined by This Heat’s Charles Bullen and Isobel Sollenberger from Bardo Pond on some tracks, all part of Grumbling Fur’s quest “for kindred spirits, open souls and players we respect.” This goes for each other, of course: “It’s often a case of both trying to work around each others ideas to balance and include one another’s voice,” they explain of the song-writing process.

Working in their own home studios, Grumbling Fur blew on the embers and Furfour began to glow. It’s a curious, generous-hearted and organic-sounding record that has its mood set by the easy harmonising of O’Sullivan and Tucker’s voices as they oat melodiously above clackering rhythms of "Milky Light," strings as celestial beings in "Silent Plans," scraps of half-heard spiritual texts and, conversely, the synth pop banger of "Acid Ali Khan" which sounds, as one writer once summed up Grumbling Fur, “like Depeche Mode in a stone circle”. Golden Simon and Heavy Days, meanwhile, describe the many horizons of the pop landscape that Brian Eno painted in Another Green World. Musical history is stuffed with male songwriting partnerships eventually driven apart by ego, but Grumbling Fur lift their music above the quotidian by making it about each other, a realisation that only by understanding our own human relationships can we comprehend how we might exist in part of something bigger. “The band is as much about our friendship and shared love of music, art, literature, lm, comics, goddesses and gods,” they explain: “Joy, bliss, friendship and expression are the central keystone to the Fur universe.”

ROSE

Grumbling Fur Time Machine Orchestra presents music for Mark Titchner's ROSE. More info soon.

LANIAKEA /// Vinyl landing

Pre-orders available here. Out in the shoppes April 29th.

LANIAKEA /// New Zero Kanada

We'll be playing our debut concert in Quebec at Festival International Musique Actuelle Victoriaville on May 22nd. We'll be joined by Jessica Moss (Silver Mt Zion) on violin and Peggy Lee (Dave Douglas, Wayne Horvitz, etc) on cello. Read about the festival here. In addition, Massimo and I will be playing a warm up show at Magasin 4 in Brussels on May 18th. Details here. Hope to see you there!

LANIAKEA /// Fairwarped Rosemullion

11,5 x 11,5 inch collage on lithograph print to accompany the LANIAKEA LP on House Of Mythology. Limited edition of 25, titled, signed and numbered. Pre-orders here.

L A N I A K E A vs T I T C H N E R

Switch to HD for maximum transpersonal excitation.

S

The Green Ray /// Wilkinson Gallery

THE GREEN RAY 
Curated by Andrew Hunt

The Wilkinson Gallery
27 February - 10 April 2016
Opening: Friday 26 February, 6-8pm

Danai Anesiadou, Anna Barriball, Ant Farm, Juliette Bonneviot, Matt Copson, Phil Coy, Jeffrey Dennis, Adham Faramawy, Travis Jeppesen, Nicholas Mangan, Xavier Mary, Mike Nelson, Lisa Oppenheim, Daniel O’Sullivan, Katrina Palmer, Yuri Pattison, Elizabeth Price, Sophie Sleigh-Johnson, Mathew Sawyer, and Michelle Ussher

After party performances by Mathew Sawyer, Daniel O’Sullivan, and The Magnetic North (Simon Tong, Hannah Peel, Erland Cooper). Free entry.

L A N I A K E A

Recorded at 147 Tower Gardens with Massimo Pupillo. A Vessel. A big sonic wave goodbye to my friend Ian Johnstone. Out soon on House Of Mythology. 

∆

Some bumph written in the third person...

LANIAKEA IS HOME. 

A reflection of our galactic supercluster, Daniel O'Sullivan (Ulver, Grumbling Fur, Æthenor, Mothlite) and Massimo Pupillo (Zu) invoke eternal vibrations devoted to living spirit in perpetual becoming. Cosmic hymns and atomised riffs slowed and stretched to unveil a pantheon of sound in particle form. Drawing on a rich tapestry of influences ranging from the plainchant of Hildegard von Bingen to Alice Coltrane's vedantic tapes to the monolithic bass frequencies of Godflesh. Laniakea investigates the micro and the macro in hermetic ubiquity. As above so below.

Recorded at 147 Tower Gardens former home to gentleman satyr and Coil affiliate Ian Johnstone (and former residence of DOS), this music was conceived soon after Ian's untimely passing. An exercise in how to transform grief into grace. How to allow grace to transform space. How space can transmit information and be transformed in sound. A space so charged with life and energy and art and magick that only the physical presence of two vessels were needed to manipulate a variety of instruments and the atmosphere provided all the rest. Daniel was custodian of the suburban dwelling in which Ian Johnstone poured enormous love and energy. Clad in dark stained wood, a dense menagerie of power amulets and the sidereal painting of Austin Osman Spare, Ian shared his home with the late Jhonn Balance of Coil up until his death in 2004. In the process of packing an immense cabinet of curiosities into cardboard boxes, Daniel was visited by his friend Massimo (now resident of the Peruvian jungle and student of shamanic power plants) and in the midst of a great grief sounds began to flow with little discussion. Only to celebrate the artistic and human heritage of dearly departed friends through music. Hence Laniakea was born. And started sailing home.

∆

T R I P M A N I F E S T B E I N G S

A selection of collages I've been making over the past year or so. I'll be showing a few of these and performing live at the opening of 'The Green Ray' at The Wilkinson Gallery on Vyner St. 26th February - 10th April.

T I M E M A C H I N E S

80+ MINUTES OF TOTAL FUCKING TRANCE IN THE BAG.

This Is Not This Heat

Feels like I've been holding my breath for the last few months, but I'm finally permitted to announce that I'll be joining This Is Not This Heat to perform material from two of my favourite LPs in music history. An immense honour.

12-13th February at Cafe Oto. Both nights are sold out.

Dogs Balls Rising

I just LOVE this photograph.

True Faith

Mute Records kindly asked if I would contribute to their online New Order homage which can be viewed here. I made an illustration based on Peter Saville's artwork for the True Faith single which I remember seeing in my uncles room as a kid. It stood out against the walls which were painted pink with burgundy gloss skirting boards.

Prints available on request.

Mothlite vs Frank Rosaly

Here lies an arrangement for Frank Rosaly's album of solo percussion works on Utech Records. Hope you enjoy.

ATGCLVLSSCAP

House of Mythology proudly presents the new Ulver gatefold double album vinyl (also available on CD), with over 80 minutes worth of material. This album consists of multitracked and studio-enhanced live, mostly improvisational, rock and electronic soundscapes, 2/3 of which has never been heard before.

In Newton’s basic laws of motion – those which lie at the heart of modern physics – the paradox stands that constant velocity is essentially as natural as being at rest. True to form, in the now twenty-two-year-old life of Ulver, only one constant has remained, that being a forward-driving spirit that has moved this mercurial Norwegian-based collective forever through challenges and adventure anew, irrespective of reductive genre pigeonholing. Moreover, their latest voyage into the unknown is no different, marking another new chapter for an outfit characterised by wild and inspiring unpredictability, along with a fresh triumph for one of modern music’s most iconoclastic forces.

The basis for ATGCLVLSSCAP – which the band has been working with under the moniker ‘12’ – arrives from recordings made at twelve different live shows that Ulver performed in February 2014, in which band the band vaulted into the deep end of an improvisatory approach to their performance. As Kristoffer Rygg, the prime mover of the band since its inception puts it wryly, “The tour was to be an experiment, kind of loose and scary for a band as ‘set in their ways’ as us.”

Although the line-up for these shows remained similar to that on 2012’s psychedelic covers album Childhood’s End, and the band had taken succour from the sounds and headspace they explored on that record, this was another break into new territory, using their live energy and spontaneity as the fuel for aural explorations that would surprise even the band themselves. “At the end of any album process, I can’t wait to do something else,” comments Rygg. ”So yeah, it is partly borne out of that feeling, being a bit bored with the circumstances. It was quite liberating to do something more in the moment. One night a jam could be five minutes, and the next it could be fifteen. We couldn’t have captured these songs in a studio environment.”

Once the tour was over, it was down to his bandmate Daniel O’Sullivan to take charge of these multitrack recordings, sculpting and editing hours of material in his North London enclave, formerly owned by charismatic artist and Coil associate, the sadly departed Ian Johnstone – as O’Sullivan noted, “The hungry ghosts of the now empty house appear to be burrowing into this record.” Anders Møller, Kristoffer Rygg and Tore Ylwizaker got involved a bit later, honing things from their end in Subsonic Society and Oak Hill Studios, Oslo, before the vinyl cutting process took place at THD Vinyl Mastering, also in Oslo, in which the band was fully involved in the crucial initial cut of the 14” lacquer. What resulted is the widescreen sweep and atmospheric splendour of ATGCLVLSSCAP, ultimately a piece of work that exists above and beyond any conventional live recording, rather a hallucinatory travelogue as potent an experience to bear witness to as it was to construct.

As always in the world of Ulver, influences are disparate and diverse, yet as Rygg notes, “It’s quite tributary in a way, there are clear nods to sounds from the past.” Many of these dwell in progressive, electronic and krautrock realms, heralding a lifelong love within the band for the music of the 70s – the fiery mantras of ‘Om Hanumate Namah’ and the motorik drive of ‘Cromagnosis’ draw an astral trajectory between the propulsion of Kraftwerk/Neu! and the ritualistic intensity of prime Amon Düül II, whilst the spirits of both Klaus Schulze and John Carpenter are audible in the electronic soundscapes of ‘Desert/Dawn’, not to mention the Bernard Herrmann touch in the closing ‘Solaris’. Even when the band revisits an earlier gem from 2000’s Perdition City album, as on ‘Nowhere (Sweet Sixteen)’, its reinvigorated by their expansive and emotionally charged approach.

“We always feel like, independently of what kind of instrumentation we use, we’re still playing the same nocturnal stuff,” laughs Rygg. “There are a few motifs that keep recurring all the time in what we do, and if it’s in a rock form or an electronic form, it’s always there.” Yet as true as this may be, by shaking up their creative process, the band have summoned up a unique testimony to the creative power of a mighty force who remain blissfully free of genre or convention, ATGCLVLSSCAP is progressive in the truest sense of the word, a record that may be this capricious band’s pièce-de-resistance. (words by Jimmy Martin)

GF vs Erasure

Shapeshifting cultural DNA. Contorting childhood memories. Happy to present our reworking of Erasure's amazing paean to the working man.