My initiative to post monthly fell flat on its face and so here is July and August appearing together. It does make a lot of sense that they appear together as not a whole lot happened to speak of when it comes to publicly published “things”.
In early July on the 2nd of the month I finally got to contribute to a netlabel I’ve been admiring for a while now – ever since Atari Seagrave-Blood got in touch about releasing through HNW and SSN Technologies. Ghost Cloud Recs is a relatively new platform for all things plunderphonic, harsh noise, vaporwave, and generally strange. My own submission in July was called A M N I O T I C A R C and sees a return of the ᴊ ᴘ ᴊ s © alias, which I previously used to create a trilogy of experimental vapor (or, vapornoise even) hosted at my own profile and nowhere else and then a further addendum entitled Ｍ Ｏ Ｎ Ｕ Ｍ Ｅ Ｎ Ｔ which I decided to host at SSN.
(Pictured below is the amazing artwork Atari made for the release)
At the end of July I moved ahead with two new worms for the Small Worm platform – Ivy Nostrum’s Compound Peds and Alomkik’s Alone in Almokik. Alongside this I made a painstakingly eventual return to batch releasing for the HNW netlabel – with the 275th through to 277th releases – having taken an extended breather since the late June release of the ‘4000 Member Compilation‘ which I hosted at the netlabel as an intermediary host of sorts for the ‘HNW Harsh Noise Wall’ group on the Facebook platform (where I am one of several administrators – increasingly, I try to spend most of my time on the platform in general taking care of this and little else). The batch included works from the anonymous alias Phantom Chopper, US-based noise artist Chuck Steak and finally the Cardiff noise artist Fatalisté who had just recently joined the ranks of the netlabel in participating with the compilation.
Fast forward to the end of August and I managed to maintain a sort of average with a new three release batch for HNW – this time coming from Julien Skrobek’s Les Cauchemars Naissent La Nuit, a relatively enigmatic project who reached out to me known as Berlin Horse and a return to the platform for Warzone Café.
All the while – I have been tirelessly slaving on the burgeoning pushes towards an inaugural tape batch for Small Worm. The batch is under way at this point – with four confirmed releases, two of which are splits, some of which the master audio is ready for and dubbing has begun, others still in the process of completion. I’m really looking forward to this and it’s possible my mind’s focus on this has led me off the trail a bit when it comes to creative work of my own (in other words, I think I’ve slowed to snail pace in the last two months mostly because of pipe-dream proliferation of new-label-brain).
I’m hoping to have this batch ready for release before September is over but I am aware this is quite hopeful. Although they are all very small runs, the editions are all hand-made, that is the inlays are drawn, cut and written by hand, and then dubbed in real-time “by hand” too.
In early August I also finally decided to offer up a digital archive for an until-then tape-only release for my Echoes … Leytonstone ambient drone project – An Orange Coloured Sky / The Storms Impending Approach. There are actually a great number of audio recordings on my hard-drive that do not exist anywhere online properly for this project, so I may hope to get off my butt with this a bit in the coming month(s) some more.
Mid-August also saw the return of the outer-family solo alias Milk Cat to the Dog Milk fold with The Return. While I have quietened down seriously with my own contributions to this collective hive-mind, I do intend to return to the aliases I have taken “off world”: the Rodent Milk alias I used to perform free improv acoustic guitar trash with a handful of times in live settings, and the Urban Rat Faced Killer alias which re-appeared on Imploding Sounds.
S H E A R M A N 