a 24/7 salad of dark electronic and obscure experimental sound

The Recognition Test #342

The beautiful new show from Italy’s Unexplained Sounds Network. Sunday 19th May 9am & Thursday 23rd May 11pm UK time.

Details on the schedule page

<1NTWRK single artist mix 

16bard

Playing 9pm Sunday 19th May 2024 and 1am Thursday 23rd May 2024 (UK time)

Details on the schedule page.

ANAKRONISM 6

The sweetly haunting mix by Signalstoerung of new music on the Adventurous Music label, for grey clay radio.

Playing Fridays 7pm and Mondays 5am, UK time, starting 10th May 2024.

See schedule page for track list.

deep motif.

A new show on grey clay, playing a selection of past motif show tracks for 2 hours, 3 times a week! See schedule page for more info.

Generative Wastelands 02

Saturday 4th May 2024 11pm and  Monday 6th May 7pm UK time - the second beautiful monthly sound journey for grey clay by Thomas Park.

Details on the schedule page

FEATURED ALBUM:

Still Moving

By

Roslyn Steer

Released on KantCope, 2015

https://kantcope.bandcamp.com/album/still-moving

When I was at school, I found almost everything interesting, but the only subject that had anything really for me was art. A teacher looked at me drawing one day and said, ‘you’re taking that line for a walk.’ I knew how to like that then, and now it is a whole appreciation of things, I think. So it is with Roslyn Steer’s  Still Moving.

The first (and title) track is just shy of a 30 minute walk. In it, almost a declaration of intent for the whole album, reciting, chanting, humming and lamenting voice; sardonic humour, distorted noise and subtly used field recording atmospherics walk a line that is both familiar in the experimental universe of sound and also very emotionally driving. This is an immense track that so naturally flows from one scene to the next, the line becomes, if not story, then certainly poetry.

There is speech - treated, distorted, glitched, collaged; and singing - but it never becomes ‘song’ recognisably. And there is guitar. Lots of it, and in many guises, again so treated it is often only just guitar, and frankly who cares? It sounds beautiful (when is a guitar not a guitar...). I’m rarely that interested in how music is actually made if I’m honest. Not when the mystique is as powerful as this.

And so onto Thus Spake. Relentless time, kept by the stamping, pleading pulse pushes into the heartbreakingly fabulous tones and chords. Again voice, like an instrument, rises and falls in refrains and undercurrents.

And on. There is no whiff of novelty here. Steer has the line fully in control and by now you are quite happy to be led. There is a joy too in the simple quality of sound, that is left to do the talking in many places, and leaving your senses feeling fully exercised.

Beautiful? Track 5, Hey Sunshine, marries such a romantic refrain with the boxy, super-treated rhythm and aching background sweeps, you forget you are listening to an extremely experimental album.

Gently is one of those surreal interludes that seems to have absolutely nothing to do with the album and yet is so perfectly placed in it, like a belly button. Charming, oddly nostalgic, vaguely unhinged and ...gorgeous.

The album concludes with a super-strange voice salad that intimately poses the existential question, Do you ever get sick? (of the sound of your own voice) and is punctuated with coughs which give the piece a kind of natural feel, almost commenting on the whole poetry of the album. It is cut off by a squirming, scraping drone that eventually has the last word. 

Still? Moving?

Moving. Definitely.

Roslyn Steer is a musician based in Coolyduff, Co. Cork.

T.Čelet (May 24)

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The featured album plays daily at 5pm, 

UK time.

Artist in Residence: 16bard. Playing new work from the Forsyth Sessions every Wednesday at 12:00 and 23:00 BST.