#miasmah

[caviarsonoro]

Olga Anna Markowska - A Heart is an Eye

Lugar común

Nadie puede nada pero los objetos pero las cosas nadie nadie pero érase una vez todas las veces nunca siempre y sin embargo

oceánicos

tu nosotros mi nosotros

Gaston Miron

[musicollage]

Rafael Anton Irisarri ‎– Daydreaming. 2007 ~ Miasmah.

[dustedmagazine]

Zelienople — Hold You Up (Miasmah)

Hold You Up by Zelienople

Long-standing Chicago trio Zelienople don’t so much take you on a journey as add weight to the air around you. This is grayscale music, waterlogged and grainy. Their new album, Hold You Up, wastes no time establishing its mood, “Safer” dropping the listener straight into Zelienople’s foggy, incandescent flow, Mike Weis’s ride cymbal racing like an anxious pulse, woody snare hits like someone knocking on the side of a coffin. Matt Christensen’s main lyrical message, “I’m safer taking care of you,” feels like one of hope — or perhaps co-dependence.

“Breathe” is suffocatingly claustrophobic, sparse cymbal strikes hissing like steam escaping from a fissure. The song’s metallic sheen of reverb casts a sinister halo around the looped piano and snatches of vocal, Christensen’s guitar jutting into the spaces around the other instruments. As the track fades out, the listener is left with two rhetorical questions: “What would I do without you? What would you do without me?” There’s no resolution. The eight-minute title track is animated by brushed cymbals, murky guitar arpeggios, and an insistent kick-drum pulse that brings to mind the ambient techno of Gas. Halfway through, the song springs to life when the vocals first interject, as though Christensen has nodded off during the hypnotic introduction, then woken up and remembered he needs to sing.

“You Have It” is propelled by a tight, shuffling groove from Weis, above which Christensen’s plucked guitar reverberates beautifully. “Just An Unkind Time” brings bassist Brian Harding to the fore, which makes for a welcome shift, as his contributions up to this point are hard to discern. Harding also brings the melodic thread to closer “America,” where the interplay between the rhythmic loop in the background and the instrumental tapestry woven in the foreground is alternately hypnotic and destabilising. Just as you think you’ve worked out the way the timing works, it seems to slip out of sync.

That feels like an apt summary of Hold You Up as a whole: the foundations are always shifting, creating the waves that give these songs their uneasy, melancholic sway. Though it’s meditative, it’s far from restful — it’s acutely conscious of the thorn in its side, the lump in its throat, the deep ache in its heart.

Tim Clarke

[gacougnol]

Listen/purchase: For This From That Will Be Filled by Clarice Jensen

[lflip]

(miasmah)

[musicollage]

Simon Scott. Navigare, 2009. Miasmah.

[thenewobjective]

Kreng ~ Wormhole

Eleven years have passed since The Summoner was released, long enough for us to wonder if we’d ever hear from Kreng again.  Over the past decade, the artist has been composing for theatre and cinema, which is a perfect pivot given his penchant for dark and moody atmospheres.  Works for Abattoir Férme 2007 – 2011 appeared on our very first collection of Music for Haunted Houses, and everything…

Kreng ~ Wormhole

[thenewobjective]

Olga Anna Markowska ~ ISKRA

We rely so much on our mediated exchanges that we often forget the importance of a passing moment, the power of a single deep breath in this world, a spark that we can feel with our whole body and soul, the sounds and colors of our surroundings, the dawn and the dusk, the wind, the smell of spring. We perform an inundation of repeated tasks only to hide further away from this spark and to be…

Olga Anna Markowska ~ ISKRA