adh008 - Ciaran Mackle Sitting Still for a Living (CD)
London-based Ciaran Mackle (Breathing Heavy, Ashcircle, Cliff Edge, etc.) is an Irish musician working primarily with sampling and improvisation. Inspired by his love of traditional folk music, the album comprises performances of songs learned through recordings by The Watersons, Lou Killen, Sam Larner, and Harry Cox. The songs were recorded in a single evening by Luciano Maggiore and feature Mackle interpreting them using only his unaccompanied voice. Performed in single takes from memory, the songs are reworked through a vocabulary of gulping, stuttering, mumbled verbiage, pushing the texture of Mackle's voice and the pure sonic qualities of the lyrical arrangements to the fore. The pieces remain somewhat recognisable to those familiar with the idiom but are drawn sharply into territories more immediately associated with the deconstructions of Sound Poetry or free vocal improvisation.
'Sitting Still for a Living' also features three long-form instrumental compositions built from recordings of tin whistle and recorder played by Mackle himself. Pulling direct influence from uilleann pipe music, these pieces introduce the influence of other traditional forms by way of Mackle's characteristically austere and disjointed approach to the sampler.
adh009 - Kiran Arora Virgin Forest (CD)
Relative to the searing, noise-driven intensity of recent albums 'Wormwood Scrubs' or Wilderness Years, Virgin Forest marks a distinct turn into far more introspective realms. Though it lacks none of the surgical ear for detail listeners have come to expect from him, Arora this time finds himself explicitly utilising a sound palette of subtle tonality, calm atmospherics and the pronounced influence of computer music in ways only hinted at in past work.
The seven tracks of Virgin Forest form a series of intricately sculpted vignettes—a film-like portrait of cryptic, nocturnal stillness: scenic and evocative, yet seemingly unanchored to any overt emotive or communicative angles. The album's buried gradients and static features contain interconnected details that invite repeat observations. In Virgin Forest's slow burning, delicate patience we find a bold and exciting statement of creative evolution come to fruition.
adh010 - Duncan Harrison There Is No Fire in the Lake (CD)
'There Is no Fire in the Lake' is Duncan Harrison's first full length album since 2019. Hovering between motion and stasis, Harrison tilts his magnifying glass toward the elusive undercurrents of the day-to-day, embracing imperfections and voids within. The physicality of magnetic tape has always been a key component of his approach, but here it becomes a language in itself; the cycling spools and hissing negative space telling tales that lurk just below the surfaces of intelligibility, exhaustion, distance, meaning.
Through Harrison's bleary lens, concepts that evade direct identification communicate themselves in deeply personal, almost diaristic fashion. These pieces are also some of his most delicate; moving beyond the baffling, roughshod absurdity of past works into something closer, starker, more calmly glimmering; as if threaded with invisible twines of light and shade.
- Jack Davidson/Duncan Harrison, Summer, 2025
£10 each. Only available direct only for now with distro announcements pending. Link in bio for further info and ordering. Get in touch for any more details. Thanks.
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