by Fred

“Apse.” “Carlos Suarez.”

The former? An effortless post-rock band we have covered several times already. I can’t keep their 2006 release Spirit out of heavy rotation. For those new to the site, find their home page here, their Facebook page here, and their Myspace page here.

The latter? One-man tsunami, ethnomusicologist, and composer of our Find of the Year so far (Live Sonar, first reviewed here). At the time I believed the work to be a single live track, but indeed there are several: “Oraculo de la guerra,” “Dialectica de la diversidad y el dogma,” “Metaforas de tempo,” and “O discurso de diversidade,” among others, and hopefully in that order. Listen to them at his Myspace page, here. We hope you’re in a brainy mood, because this is music for museums. By the end of it you may feel obligated to trade out your contact lenses for a pair of spectacles.

Without exaggeration, I haven’t listened to anything else since last December.

This, however, may vie for some attention:

I fell in love with electronic music after hearing Kraftwerk on the radio at the age of ten, back in the days when they still built their own instruments. As a teenager I had a room full of ancient reel-to-reel tape recorders, playing impossibly long tape loops, and a primitive synthesizer built inside a biscuit tin. I have played around with synthesizers ever since, often blending electronic sounds with field recordings. Nowadays most things happen on a laptop, in my mind the most remarkable and powerful musical instrument ever invented. But perhaps not quite as much fun as constructing tape loops used to be.

In recent years I have mostly focused on soundscape composition, but I am also very interested in using electronics in live performance. Summer schools at COMA and Dartington Hall were a big help in learning how to improvise and to perform with other musicians. For a time I was active with LEAPS (the Live Experimental Arts Performance Society), performing regularly in the Cambridge area at a variety of different events. The absolute highlight was performing an extended improvisation in the Cambridge’s Museum of Technology, located in a Victorian pumping station, as part of the Digital-Analogue Cambridge (DAC) Festival in 2001.

More recently, having moved to Dorset, I have been performing with the Safehouse Collective which meets regularly in the Lighthouse Centre, Poole, and the free improvisation group ZAUM. I am also a member of the electroacoustic improvisation duo nemeton and the improvising laptop ensemble No Context. I’ve recently discovered the joys of circuit bending and am now trying to build my own instruments, which is wonderful subversive fun.

I have been a member of Sonic Arts Network for many years, and am also currently a member of UKISC, the UK acoustic ecology group, which is affiliated to the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology.

Click the link above for a free download of Arish Mell, and click here for the bio.