#rivertones

[lacy-v]

River Tones #rivertones #thebangbangbar #satx #photography #vxcphotography https://www.instagram.com/p/B9KoVlkHPoM/?igshid=3or6s2bcjj4g

[drunkenwerewolfdotcom]

Darren Hayman's Thankful Villages Volume 2 is delightful

Read the article in full on DrunkenWerewolf:

If there’s one thing England has plenty of, it’s villages. You can’t move for the lil’ pesky things. Everywhere you look they’re there. They just keep on popping up, doing their thing. Yorkshire villages? They’re a thing. Somerset villages? Oh God,...

Full article here.

[thebrokenbonesoftheworld]

July Skies "Branch Line Summers Fade"

[dustedmagazine]

Be — One (Rivertones)

When presented with an album without much context other than that it’s ambient drone and involves bees, there are a couple of obvious directions you might imagine the work going in. One might be to take a Matmosian kind of approach and construct a set of songs entirely sourced from the bees themselves and their environment. Another would be to focus on exactly the kind of drone you might first think about in relation to bees; heavy, seething, somehow alien and sinister. The fact that Be’s One doesn’t take either of these avenues has a lot to do with the fact that it isn’t just an album, but rather an extension of an entirely different sort of work of art. English artist Wolfgang Buttress’s The Hive is a 17-foot structure which hums and buzzes and shifts, controlled by the vibrations of a nearby actual hive of bees. It’s striking just to see a picture of the installation, and from all accounts actually being inside is even more so. So how did we get from there to this somewhat modestly appointed 36-minute album? 

The first part of that answer is a series of fortuitous connections. Buttress worked on the project with Dr. Martin Bencsik, an expert in bee communication, and was so struck by the deep thrum of the hive that he decided to create a soundtrack for the piece. Bencsik’s wife Deirdre, a classically trained cellist, was able to find a register that went with the 40,000 bees in the installation (they buzz in C, apparently), and was joined by Kev Bales and Tony Foster (who have played with Spiritualized, Julian Cope, etc). For “The Hive,” the one track here that has vocals, Buttress’s daughter Camille improvised some lyrics. Others were prevailed upon to add their own input (Iceland avant-chamber outfit amiina and Foster and Bales’ old boss Jason Pierce), but the bees also wound up included in more surprising and significant ways than just the warm, ever-present buzz you get when dealing with a hive. The recurring bits here that sound a bit like unusual animal sounds, or maybe a malfunctioning robotic puppy? Those, too, are parts of the vocabulary of bees. And many of the human generated sounds, whether lap steel or Mellotron, wound up using a system of noises gates that means they become part of the flow of the music when triggered by the bees. 

So what’s under the hood on One is interesting enough, but you might wonder how it actually sounds? The opening 19-minute “The Journey” frequently feels like a bit of a cross between the hymnal, pastoral atmospherics of Mountains’ earliest, most field-recording dependent work and (especially when the bees summon that lap steel) something like the rural roadside ambience of the KLF’s Chill Out (minus the radio stations). The parts where Pierce’s guitar and harmonica poke through suggest how lovely his more drone- or repetition-based work would be even if it never actually achieved the explosion he tends to build towards, but mostly he just sounds like part of the fabric. Bencsik’s cello and amiina’s other strings wind up taking what center stage there is much of a time, but always with the richly satisfying underlay that, well, you only really get with 40,000 bees. After “The Journey” the second half of the album splits into three relatively shorter tracks, of which the foreboding “The Hive” with its simultaneously dispassionate and strongly stirring vocals makes the biggest impression. 

If a listener didn’t know the provenance of the music on One, it would still be a perfectly enjoyable and engrossing album of rich drone, as patient and well-judged and frequently moving as many examples made solely by humans. If anything, the richness of the strings and how well they go with the bees means that One might be more immediately ingratiating or traditionally ‘beautiful’ than many of its peers. But it’s 2016, and while we’ve all got the death of the author firmly under our belts it’s also long past the time when we’ve been able to admit that context does actually make a difference (just not the difference, at least in all cases), and Be’s work has some awfully fascinating context. You can try and picture how this music would work walking through The Hive in person, or contemplate the fact that music made at least somewhat along the cycles and activities of bees instead of with human artistic intent in mind still winds up feeling pretty consonant, or just marvel a little at the processes that went into making this album. In any case, what’s here is good enough to make you hope they can somehow keep the interspecies ensemble together for future efforts.

Ian Mathers

[ameremancunian]

Hauntingly beautiful. Mind, as soon as you see the name Carr you know it'll be cracking... 😉 #katecarr #ihadmyselfanuclearspring #caughtbytheriver #rivertones #vinyl #lp #nowplaying

[plentywenlock]

Incredibly pleased to announce I'll be joining my very good friends July Skies on percussion for the Port Eliot Festival in Cornwall this coming Thursday 28th July. We'll be on the Caught By The River stage at around 8:15pm. Diolch,

Eric

[drunkenwerewolfdotcom]

Darren Hayman explores rural life via Thankful Villages

Read the article in full on DrunkenWerewolf:

Those who only know of Darren Hayman because of his work with Hefner have a lot of catching up to do. Now on his 14th solo studio album with Thankful Villages, Hayman has has an increasing interest in chronicling Britain’s underbelly through his music. It’s patriotism of a sort, but i...

Full article here.

[norigret]