Helen Scarsdale

Murmer

Tether

Helen Scarsdale

***Murmer is the long-standing project of American/Estonian field recordist and composer Patrick McGinley, and with Tether, The Helen Scarsdale Agency welcomes Murmer back to our roster, over a decade since he graced us with his last production for the Agency. His field recordings often center upon the amplification and activation of resonance from a particular space, landscape, or object. Such sounds emerge from a condition as being fleeting, inconsequential, or ephemeral and explode into that which is alien, sublime, and profound. Here lies the tremendous prowess of the contact microphone, as wielded by an accomplished musician! The source material cited by McGinley includes cables, fences, wires, and vents. There is a heft to many of these sounds as heard throughout all of "Taevast" with deep throbbing pulsations from arctic wind generating subharmonic patterns upon thick high-tension wires. Elsewhere the subtle dissonance from a rasping cooling fan blooms into a brooding ambience that is sublimely rich in its metallic timbres and complex reverberations. McGinley has long been an exemplary artist in the field of phonography even as he is less prolific than others. On Tether, he has produced a majestic if occasionally foreboding work on par with the mythic wire recordings of Alan Lamb, Jacob Kirkegaard's haunted resonance from Chernobyl, and much of the Touch catalogue for that matter!

Taiga Remains

Works For Cassette

Helen Scarsdale

***In the final drone / hypnogogic statement from ALEX COBB under this moniker, a sadness of things hangs in the air. The decaying sound is a steady dissolution of one pattern chromatically rippling into another, which in turn diffuses into another, and the cycle continues. Mystery and ambiguity hang upon Cobb’s crepuscular minimalism; radiant guitar drones flecked with impressionist melodies bathe in the snow of a thousand radios placed throughout Easter Island offering forth their eerie, luminous and beautiful sound that floats among the stoic heads that gaze beyond the horizon of the Pacific ocean toward infinity (or oblivion if you prefer a more sublime reading). Includes “Sup Pralad,” “There’s Nothing” and “Skin, Leaves” from Beneath The Weeping Beeches cassette (Ekhein 2008), and “Winter Tai-Tung,” and “Spring Shan-Lin-Shi” from Thereafter cassette (Arbor 2008).