Thirty Three Thirty Three

Oglon Day is the debut release from the quartet of Oren Ambarchi, Mark Fell, Will Guthrie and Sam Shalabi.

Though Ambarchi had previously worked on separate occasions with Fell and Guthrie, the two days the four musicians spent together in a London studio producing this LP was their first meeting as a quartet, preceding an acclaimed performance at the 2016 Masafat Festival.

Coming from diverse backgrounds and concerns, the four musicians have created an effortless blend of their seemingly disparate approaches, carving out a musical space that gives equal weight to Ambarchi's physically affecting guitar explorations, Fell's stuttering electronic pulse, Guthrie's virtuosic drumming and Shalabi's psychedelic oud improvisations.

Oglon Day is an inspired meeting of the acoustic and the electronic, the composed and the improvised, the human and the machine, the austere and the joyous. Quite unlike anything else in the four musicians'respective back catalogues, it also offers a surprisingly accessible point of entry for any listener so lucky as to be unfamiliar with their work

Thirty Three Thirty Three is proud to present the debut LP from the Clandestine Quartet, bringing together Alan and Richard Bishop with Michael Flower and Chris Corsano. Invited to perform in London as part of the St John Sessions series, Alan Bishop rounded up this quartet of underground stalwarts with a deep history of collaborative ventures - the Bishop brothers making up two-thirds of the legendary Sun City Girls, Richard Bishop and Corsano comprising two parts of psychedelic juggernaut Rangda, and the Flower-Corsano Duo having wowed audiences for over a decade with their face-melting brand of eastern-tinged free shred.

The quartet spent four days in the studio developing material for the London show and recording the seven pieces heard here (five across the two sides of the LP, accompanied by two digital bonus tracks). They settled, for the most part, on something approaching a classic rock quartet line-up: Richard Bishop on electric guitar, Michael Flower on his signature amplified Japanese banjo'(an Indian keyed zither), Alan Bishop on bass and Chris Corsano manning the drums. Rather than a straight-up improvised blowing session, the LP strikes a balance between free-flowing spontaneous interaction and structured surprise, alternating between zoned-out group meditations and stop-on-a-dime unison dynamics.

On the epic side-long opener Don't Hang From My Ceiling', a lyrical weave of guitar, bass and Japanese banjo lines approaches the unhurried melodic invention of Indian classical music until Corsano's tumbling, free-form drums incite the quartet into an ecstatic crescendo, over which Richard Bishop's guitar unfurls a euphoric solo that calls to mind the mystical grandeur of prime Popol Vuh.

The B side finds the quartet branching out both in terms of instrumentation and compositional strategies, crafting a suite of pieces that, like classic Sun City Girls, move unexpectedly from tightly locked bass and drum grooves to explosions of free jazz alto saxophone (courtesy of Alan Bishop) and from shimmering guitar jams to massed choirs of horns. (So Long) Harry Dean', one of the record's highlights, finds Richard Bishop on piano, leading the quartet through a languorous series of chords punctuated by Corsano's gracefully ungainly percussive accents, before a sudden blast of reed horn announces a passage of rapid-fire dissonance that seamlessly transitions back into the pianistic meandering of the track's first-half.

Effortlessly balanced between improvisation and composition, melody and noise, rhythm and space, the Clandestine Quartet is a fitting next step for this group of psychedelic troubadours, showing them drawing on their past accomplishments but never content to stand still.

Tracklisting:
Side A:
1. Don't hang from my Ceiling

Side B:
1. Thank You Mr. Jackpots
2. (So long) Harry Dean
3. One for the Fossa, Two for the Wolverine
4. Wrong Church

Release Date: 04/10/2019

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 meterless, 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, 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.

Tracklisting
Side A:
1. Bathe Pt 2
2. Trickle
3. Temples
4. Bathe Pt 3
5. Ark

Side B:
6. Drift
7. Breathe (Paseo)
8. Water Wheel
9. Island
10. Bleached
11. Cradle

Release Date: 22/11/2019