Bandcamp Friday recommendations

 Here's some new cool stuff to buy on today's Bandcamp free Friday.

Roy Montgomery - Island Of Lost Souls (Grapefruit)

EPIC psychedelic bubblegum drone by legendary New Zealand musician, with a track dedicated to Florian Fricke, and a sound that wouldn't be out of place in the soundtrack of Blade Runner.

Judith Hamann - Shaking Studies (Blank Forms Editions)

Beautiful cello/electronics drone/classical experimentations, not unlike Morton Feldman.

Lush Worker - Immunosuppression / Preacher / Cygnus / Consort (Cruel Nature Records)

Bong's Mike Vest offers four albums-worth of material sounding like Azathoth the blind idiot god jamming in the center of the universe with Electric Wizard and Hawkwind.

Martina Bertoni - Music For Empty Flats (Karlrecords)

It's Bandcamp cello Friday. Another cellist experimenting with the possibilities of her instrument, this is great ambient based on processed recordings of cello similar to Giulio Aldinucci and Lawrence English.

Sage Alyte - Paume De Pierre (Vlek)

Belgian fee folk/psych anthems in the vein of...well....the well-expected Belgian free folk quality.

Litte Skull - Lower Hope Reach (Horn Of Plenty)

If you read this blog regularly, you know what to expect from Little Skull. Enough said.

Ash Cooke & Phil Jenkins - A Fly Is In My Ear (Liquid Library)

Ash Cooke's (Chow Mwng) usual abrasive prepared acoustic guitar instrument-bending improvisations are here accompanied by drums adding a more free jazz quality.

Chow Mwng - Mollip & Reptile tape

The theme of Chow Mwng in this tape is Seasonal Affective Disorder, accompanied by a bleak written pieces. And the sounds are slightly bleaker as well, in relation to the more playful aspects of most of his releases. The sound is more lo-fi, decidedly darker, there are of course lots of moments with prepared guitar and found objects, and there's also more screeching, tape manipulation and ringing keyboard depression. And as with all Chow Mwng releases, it's a great one. 2018 tape released on the New Zealand-based Independent Woman Records.

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Chow Mwng - Beca cd

Chow Mwng, the alias of Ash Cooke, returns with a brilliant piece of experimental ingenuity; inspired by a Welsh artist group called Beca (who I know nothing about), he has created 5 tracks of Gwrth - gitâr (anti-guitar): this is improvised anti-music played on a stringless and prepared acoustic guitar and with accompanying senseless growls. This is a fine piece of musique concrète that deserves to be heard and disseminated, as it pushes the boundaries of what free music is and develops new ways of doing things with instruments. Great job done. You can listen to it and offer some cash to the Wormhole World bandcamp, which does an excellent job at making forward-thinking musicians heard.

Chow Mwng: The Music of Welsh shapeshifter Ash Cooke

In a recent post on Die Or DIY about Michael Morley's Gate, it was said that Morley gives the impression that he can't play the guitar and that he's quite good at pretending to not be able to do so. Well, if playing the guitar means soloing like Joe Satriani, let's hope that Morley really is paraplegic when it comes to guitar-playing.

The same impression is also passed by Ash Cooke, Welsh guitar player for Derrero (when it comes to lo-fi indie of the more electric variety, you can't get better than them), guitar/keyboard/whatever torturer of solo project Pulco, and more recently in Chow Mwng, as well as designer for the covers of TQ Zine.



Nunavik was the one release that introduced Ash to me and probably most people, as it was a free giveaway with TQ #7. In this recording he emulates the Canadian Inuit peoples throat singing style to challenge Western-centric notions of what correct music stands for, and he mixes it with maddening improvisations for Casio synth, percussive junk and guitar whateverness. In fact it sounds like a really damaged human beat box on avant-garde overdose. Cool!

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In Ah, Alpine! he combines unmusical acoustic guitar strums, apreggios and pinched notes with heavy guitar chorus effect, some drum hi hat doodling and casio synth without any reason.

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Perforation Function. Amazing work. This is Chow's most melodic/real guitar playing, delivering some pretty acoustic jazz guitar arpeggios while also including his usual synth noise, stream-of-consciousness lyrics, and percussive doodlings. There's a nice concept behind it, too, as this has been his response to David Howcroft's Nurse With Wound mail art action, during which he sent out to volunteers a dismantled tape of a NWW Tusk Festival tape, asking them to destroy/deconstruct it as they saw fit. I understand that most people just smashed it, but Chow Mwng made music around it, resulting in this hereby release, where apart from his live improvisations he includes several samples from said NWW recording. Added to that, he's gonna play live while David will be exhibiting the results of his mail art action during this year's Tusk. I absolutely love this music. (Posset has also made a sound response to the NWW action, producing a tape's worth of a loop of the gig).

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Stuttering Hand is my favorite of the lot whereby he focuses exclusively on guitar improvisations and prepared guitar damage.

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More of the same prepared guitar nothingness on One Day All This Will Make Sense? Gimme more!

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Even more guitar nonsense/noise collages accompanying an art zine featuring Chow's great artwork.

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