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LP
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ODA 005LP
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Written, recorded and produced by Kirk Barley in Yorkshire in early 2024, Lux picks up where 2023 LP Marionette leaves off, conjuring a mystical, reflective space between formal minimalism and sonic imaginaries of northern landscapes. And yet, where Marionette relied at times on more recognizable field recordings, Lux leans into Barley's skill as an instrumentalist and sound designer, working from a palette of short samples and utilizing a variety of alternate tuning systems to build, layer and coax his compositions into being. Most evident on tracks "Vita," "Sprite" and "Descendent," these tunings create an otherworldly harmonic language that is easier to perceive than describe. Alongside more familiar instruments of guitar, bass, drums, organ and clarinet, here Barley draws on plastic saxophones and bells, and recordings of glass, wood and metal sound objects to provide the organic matter. Rather than directly representative of the natural world, Lux enters into a dialogue with it which, like the grasses and flowers of the album's cover, exists somewhere between reality and artifice. On album opener "Cache," Barley constructs his own sense of time from a recording of an umbrella crank, a sparse and spectral piece which hints at memories embedded in the track's title. Introspection blossoms into new life on "Vita," crumpling again into the percussive ambience of "Verre." A track that takes its harmonic lead from the clinks of glass, it features Barley's long-time collaborator Matt Davies on drums, whose nuanced, tonally sensitive playing gives "Verre" a fizzing, ice-like quality. There are several moments where Lux picks up on themes Barley explored under electronic moniker Church Andrews on recent works with Davies, stretching and distorting temporalities most explicitly on "Descendent," whose ritualistic air unfurls around a pattern in exponential decline. Embracing the surrealism Barley absorbed over years watching classic film noir and the works of David Lynch and Federico Fellini, Lux wends its way through the enchanted sound worlds of "Sprite" and "Balanced" before arriving at the album's title track. An expression of his recent experiments in live, prepared guitar, "Lux" brings the album back to earth, returning us to the room where the rain has stopped, the clouds have parted, and the soft warmth of the spring sun is pouring in through the open window.
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ODA 002LP
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The organic minimalism of composer and producer Kirk Barley is collected on his new studio album Marionette, released via Odda Recordings. Whether drawing from field recordings, found sound, instrumental improvisations or synthetic processes, Barley's compositions evoke unfolding sound worlds, as simple ideas or motifs are layered and developed into complex set-pieces that reveal themselves over time. Marionette showcases the breadth and variety of the Yorkshire-born artist's sound, weaving together familiar and uncanny moods of rural England and its Victorian architecture, as suggested by the gated garden print of the album's cover. Unfurling between physical textures -- the patina of vinyl crackle or gentle rain -- and the hyper-real spaces that his music inhabits, Barley describes the compositions as "landscape or static scene paintings," with many of the album's tracks taking nature's rhythms as their compositional cue. Drawing from jazz, minimalism and techno, Barley focuses on the detailed qualities of sound, experimenting with time signatures, temporals and tuning systems. His esoteric alter-ego Bambooman (2013-2018) found a home on Matthew Herbert's Accidental imprint, releasing the album Whispers in 2017. In contrast, under the pseudonym Church Andrews (most notably in collaboration with drummer Matt Davies), he produces synthetic, often beat-focused music, using digital synthesis and algorithmic composition techniques, with the live drum performances triggering and modulating Barley's synths. The duo has recently performed at festivals such as Rewire and Waking Life, filmed sessions for Fact Magazine and Slate & Ash, and recently had their music played out by Aphex Twin. Under his own name, Barley released his debut album Landscapes (TTTT 010LP) in 2019 on 33-33 Records and received support from the likes of NTS Radio and BBC 6 Music. Barley has performed at events across the UK and Europe alongside the likes of Andy Stott, Beatrice Dillon, Jan Jelinek, MF DOOM, and Madlib. He has also completed commissioned work for the British Art Show, Camden Arts Centre, MSCTY and the Open Music Archive.
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TTTT 010LP
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Landscapes is the latest release from prolific Yorkshire born composer and producer Kirk Barley (Bambooman). Across a tight 34-minute runtime, the album presents eleven short pieces that inhabit an exotic, other-worldly space of chiming guitars, buzzing insects, and squelching synth tones. Working with looped fragments of his own instrumental, electronic, and field-recorded sounds, Barley assembled the tracks from edited improvisations, some of them enriched with live drums from Matt Davies. Barley's skittering, off-kilter loops overlap freely, combining with meter-less, free-jazz-inspired drumming, and processed environmental field recordings to craft gently surging sonic environments. At once static and constantly shifting, the pieces unfold themselves like views of a landscape, where we take in individual details one at a time while always remaining aware of the whole. Deeply influenced by the "Fourth World" philosophies of trumpeter Jon Hassell, champion of a music bridging global traditions and contemporary technologies, Landscapes integrates electro-acoustic techniques with suggestions of a variety of non-western musical forms, from the pitched percussion effects of "Water Wheel" (calling to mind the incredible bamboo tube percussion of Solomon Islands music) to the stately Gamelan-esque procession of clanging metallic tones and deep, filtered synth chords that underlies the pop and crackle of fireworks on "Ark". Several pieces make use of a drifting pentatonic harmony that brings them close to the work of Japanese ambient pioneer Hiroshi Yoshimura, though Barley's productions are so rich in detail and surprise that they demand active listening. At other times, a distinctly English sensibility makes itself felt in the pastoral expanses of gently spaced chords and chiming guitar harmonics, calling up the delicate miniatures of Simon Fisher Turner and Colin Lloyd Tucker's cult Deux Filles project. Landscapes is an unassuming but powerful work that uses a rich array of details, materials, and techniques to conjure 11 snapshots of a unique sound world, one both comforting and disorienting. Recommended for anyone moved by the evocative sketches of Eno's Music for Films (1976), the fourth world fusion of Jon Hassell, the abstract explorations of the far-side of club music techniques of Giuseppe Ielasi/Inventing Masks or the tropical soundscapes of Lievens Martens/Dolphins Into The Future.
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