Alaskan Tapes - Sleeping Since Last Year
This album bringing me right back to the place where I left this blog 8 years ago. At that times i was heavily searching for elecroacustical ambient and instrumental electronica. Now it's quite a rare genre, most of it left and forgotten over small net-labels and cdr imprints around internet, but his releases is rare example of that style that continue to living with personalities like Brady Kendall - man behind Alaskan Tapes.
According to his Bandcamp page, Brady are based of Toronto and started to release under this moniker around 2015. His early released exploring piano and instruments and it seams for me, that with the time he proceed his instruments and composing skills to the further level with additional focus towards texturing and experimental approaches to his material. "Sleeping Since Last Year" have very thick depth and many layers of slight and gradual ambiance. It feels warm and open. All of five tracks on this album is not alike, you can able hear different instruments - guitar, piano, strings along with synth pads and elements of field recording and singing gives it an extra calm atmosphere. This kind of music I prefer to listen to on slow and sunny Saturday mornings.
Available on CD and Cassette editions separately and in bundle.
bandcamp: https://alaskantapes.bandcamp.com/album/sleeping-since-last-year
https://alaskantapes.com/
Blear Moon - Expanding lands
My new album released via secret press on March 15th 2020.
It was in the work for over a year. First improvisations for that was recorded during my stay in Taiwan in 2018. At that time I was trying our morning routine of Nils Frahm where he doing piano improvisations every morning before having breakfast and record them on tape machine. For digital improvisation it's a different story because as soon as I manage to create any kind of set up or find a satisfying sound for trying out - all the sleep is long time gone and I am fully awake. Never the less, this consistency give me much material to store for later use.
Later in February of 2020 I went to Russia to my parent house to renew my European permits and prepare some document that I would need later I got in to situation of lock-down. Borders closed, my friends, fiancee and studio now was thousands kilometers away and I stuck with some of my equipment at my room, where I lived first 18 years of my life before moving to Czech Republic almost ten years ago.
So... a perfect time to get back to music. I've started to look trough my sketches and samples in my library that grew big for all this time. Most of the melodies I haven't listened since originally recorded and haven't even remembering its existence. I've noticed, how those melodies are similar to entries from dream-journal: at first, it's reminds of nothing, but couple notes later memories and feeling flush back like a big wave, bringing back a full picture of who I was at that moment in past, what I was going through in life, how I felt and what i was wishing for. A collection of abstract sound texture and synth melodies that tell personal stories only I could read.
I chose number of them that sound more pleasant for me and than I jam on top of them, texturing, pitching, cutting, editing and manipulated with them in many ways. I've recorded them on different tapes, played guitar on top of them, combined it with samples and noises from my library and added layers of synth lines with bunch of filters and effects. In this way it was like a jamming with past-self.
The title Expanding lands represent for me this combinations of different life periods as landscapes, that is evolving and combining with matter of life. Experiences and stories adding one to another and pierced together with a continuous thread of time.
Available for free download with limited hand-made CDr and Cassette tape editions.
https://secretpress.bandcamp.com/album/expanding-lands
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/6FBG5d9WOYRFVpBge4sT0b?si=PqeyjYnaRZinfFZH2ZzfxA
