Well I went a little quiet on this site for the end of 2020 there but I didn’t have much to report anyway. Now here we are in February 2021 and I have a lot to announce.
Unlike the previous batch, this comes at a time where the UK is relaxing tier 3 lockdown regulations but at a slow and steady pace – as such, I am only posting any orders out from the label once all orders have been filled for all available tapes (this is not exactly hard as they are all limited edition runs of 10). This is to avoid non-essential journeying through one, convenient trip to the post office for all tapes.
February is LGBTQ+ History Month here in the UK and Black History Month over the pond in the US. I am beginning to raise funds for two fund pools – one will be split among the NPO’s below and the other will be split among the funds that go directly to individuals below:
I strongly recommend that you show your support by further researching these organisations and individuals and the important work that they do and contributing your own donations as well.
I have always tried to make my tape editions low cost to the listener so that they remain accessible but I will be increasing the price slightly for this upcoming fundraiser batch to reflect the importance of giving to these causes.
If anybody reading has suggestions of relevant funds and/or organisations to add to the above lists, please let me know about them by writing to me at jpjshearman@gmail.com
Thank you for taking the time to read this and for all of your support.
Well, I had brain failure moment and for some reason believed I’d already dedicated a post here to my goings on in October, and that just my November was late – and I look back now only to find out I was knocking out Septembers in arrears in early October and I’m actually two months behind.
Needless to say – not a whole lot went down in all that time – and there are some real, but personal, excuses as to why I’m only posting this update now.
Beginning with newest developments and working my way backwards, I decided to finally reassume my role as participant in the Noisevember‘challenge’. My contributions consist of a daily track recorded on the fly, attributed to my own name at my main Bandcamp page for such work, imaginatively entitled N > V 2020 with an accompanying (very Worm-esque) illustration of mine for album artwork. And, speak of the devil, one of the small worms, Bedworm, has also begun the same exercise – with an ongoing work at the platform entitled noisevember from bed. Below are the artworks for each respectively.
N > V 2020noisevember from bed
When it comes to netlabel activity – I received no submissions, nor made any plans for releases of my own, for either SSN Tech or Terrarium in either month, and both platforms can essentially be considered on semi-hiatus pending arbitrary rousing (though there are two to three nebulous plans for things towards SSN at some future date at least). I received two submissions for the HNW netlabel, which are great works, but as I like to release in batches of three with this platform in particular I had been holding out for hope of a third, when it seems I should have just dedicated some time to filling out the slot myself to speed things along for the artists (and for that lack of judgement I apologise profusely to the two of you concerned). They will obviously still see the digital light of day – hopefully soon.
I spent a bulk of October getting 3/4 of the initial tape batch for Small Worm definitively finished. And I was successful in doing this and I am really happy with how these three releases turned out. As my post prior to the one before this shows, the batch is meant to contain four releases, and there’s been some delay in completing the larger, more ambitious project of the four (a double cs four-way split in a run of 20). I am currently weighing the decision to prolong the release of this split and announce and drop the three completed releases – but I’m honestly not sure where I’m going with that yet. There remains a small phase of deliberation – but since the second national lockdown of the UK was announced not so long ago, it seems well-timed to take a surprising step back to patiently wait and reflect more on how best to move forward with this (which is what I’m doing).
On the 15th October, a humongous interview with Musique Machine’s Roger Batty surfaced. It had already been available to the sites Patreon supporters for a week or two prior to this and was something I worked on by email with Roger over a span of weeks as well. I’m really happy and in fact humbled with how it turned out and the reception it has received from some friends and colleagues who wrote to me personally about it. In it we mostly talk about my now nearly a decade-long path through noise, my main former project A Raja’s Mesh Men, my curatorial role for the HNW netlabel and my surrounding thoughts and feelings on ‘noise culture’ at large. I feel it’s fairly in-depth though I think sometimes that might just translate as me going on too long about something. I’m a bit of a perfectionist but I can’t help but feel as much as there was time and patience and edits and re-edits put into this that some of my answers read so off-the-cuff and lacking in consideration. Overall though, of course, for the most-part I’m happy with how it turned out and I have such unending gratitude to Roger and the MM platform for inviting me to be featured in this way, alongside such great artists that have preceded me.
As I did the last time I made a few-days-late monthly post, I neglected to mention another thing I’ve been involved with (something organised in September but happening soon/now) – and once again it’s a thing that deserves its own post anyway. Trench Art Noise have put together a programme of international wallers to take part in a virtual, live-streamed HNW festival – and I will be streaming a two hour HNW performance to my Twitch channel on Sunday 4th October (tomorrow) from 18:00 to 20:00 (BST) as part of it.
I’m posting about it incredibly last minute as it’s actually officially just begun and is currently streaming – Wormb (ignore the late time on the flyer, as it’s old) is on now here. As you will see from the flyer, it runs on until Tuesday 6th.
I’m really looking forward to getting back into the streaming saddle as I have left my noise~streaming on an indefinite hiatus for a while now. Below is the flyer for the event with all of the times and various self-run platforms where you can find the performances. I’m hoping to catch as many sets as I can, I’m currently watching the Wormb and it’s great.
*my Twitch URL has since changed from the one listed above to /shearmann
September has been a weird old month. I have mainly been focusing on slow-burners that are works in progress so there’s not much to write home about. A lot of encouraging progress has been made with the inaugural tape batch for Small Worm – although I had anticipated being ready with it for release by the end of September, due to some delays it’s looking like it’ll be sometime this month – hopefully not too long into it.
I can make a brief announcement about the upcoming titles – SWP02 – A Ghost’s Ghost / The David Scott Cadieux Center for Field and Room Recording – Trace Memories & Sympathetic Magic c55 SWP03 – Gaseous Acolyte / a body without organs / Vomir / Sean & Richard Ramirez Matsuz (project TBA) 4-way split 2xcs c20/c30 SWP04 – Little Fictions – Territory of Light c30 SWP05 – Ancient Weakling – Soft Heart, Softer Limbs c20
I would say I’m a little over three quarters of the way through production at this point so pending any possible further delays, I will have the batch out some time in October. I am very excited about this!
I also wrapped up a “remix” compilation for the platform featuring a number of familiar faces and welcomed the legendary DronVerm Milbemax to the worm-fold. The artwork for both is shown below.
In the last weeks of September I also had an interview with Musique Machine‘s Roger Batty – it’s pretty lengthy and mostly focuses on my inception into the world of HNW – it’s finished and available to read on the site’s Patreon now and will be publishing on the site in two weeks time.
In my haste to double-month-post yesterday I neglected to recall two big developments that did take place within the time frame. The main reason I forgot to do so is both projects involved a lot of prior work across the preceding months and as such didn’t feel as recent as that in my brain. (TLDR; My brain does not work)
On August 3rd I was humbled to appear in the Northern Flame catalogue, a sub-label of GERÄUSCHMANUFAKTUR focusing on the apex at which black metal and noise converge into one beautifully horrific thing, with ‘Abandoned Mausoleum’ from my Roadside Dead alias – a brief double-attack of wind-whipping hissing and screeching and caustic static crunch, with even a little depressive slow buried-riffing on the B-side. Labelhead Jan Warnke took care of all the visual and presentation side to the release and he did an immaculate as ever job – Jan has very carefully constructed an exacting aesthetic when it comes to his labels and their accompanying visual style.
This is only the third edition in the Northern Flame roster and I seriously cannot wait to see which great artistic talent I get to share this stage with as time progresses – the first two releases absolutely blew me out of the water – Migis from Semănat followed by the eponymous collaborative work of Charles Razeur & Barditus. The photographs of the release below were taken by Jan.
And before that, in late July, Sven K (labelhead of Void Worship among others and artist behind such seminal noise aliases as Panic and Opaque to name very few of a plethora) dropped his inaugural issue of the dedicated HNW publication A Wall of Text. Self-described as ‘a paper publication dedicated to the appreciation of wallcraft’.
It was my extreme honour to be asked to contribute the opening page following the index, the “SHEARMAN_ WALL MANIFESTO” – many if not all of the sections in the publication are going to become ongoing, repeating ‘columns’ and the manifesto opener is no exception. I also contributed the illustration that paired with my words, a minimalist sketch not dissimilar from my visual work with Small Worm (an intentional allusion since I intend to become so much more active with this platform in particular this year).
Obviously, when I was asked to come up with my own version of a HNW manifesto, I couldn’t help but lean towards ‘anti-manifesto’ – my manifesto is incapable of cementing boundaries, formalising goals or clearly stating intentions – my manifesto is essentially to declare myself an absurdist of sorts, with my relation to existence being absurd, my relation to wall noise is thus absurd also by extension. The photographs/images below were taken/created by Sven.
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”.
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.
Alone in AlomkikCOMPOUND PEDS
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.
June has been a pretty confusing month – I felt like I would end up slowing down creatively compared to May but I think I ended up keeping a steady course somehow – and I also magically turned a year older.
The D.E.S.T.T.C.C.O.L.V. collaboration I only mentioned in my May post came to the surface a touch earlier than expected and dropped on the very first of the month – alongside a very limited edition of ten tapes that managed to sell out within a day and a half of going up. The enthusiasm I’ve felt off the back of this has pushed me into a number of plans to continue in this vein. I plan to announce an inaugural batch of similarly limited physical editions for the label soon (much behind the scenes work has already begun but sadly most of it I can’t, or won’t, spill the beans on here).
Since then, I have announced the inaugural double-release for ambient noise wall hum-and-crackle worship project A Ghost’s Ghost – Spectral Voices and Formless Veils – as well as welcoming Nicholas Maloney, of Warm Milk Recordings, with a bit of slow-fade sensation on S/S and Bedworm with yet another double-feature, the neighbours are doing DIY and computer keyboard. So the good ol’ Worm has been pretty productive writhing in the meantime as well – and this is not to even mention the upcoming Remix Party release that will see many old worm-bits return for a rework. Below is a gallery of the illustrative work I’ve been doing for the aforementioned releases.
A Ghost’s Ghost – Spectral VoicesA Ghost’s Ghost – Formless VeilsNicholas Maloney – S/SBedworm – the neighbours are doing DIYBedworm – computer keyboard
I also drank a bit too much coffee one morning (actually that’s most mornings) and quietly shuffled this out of my body and onto my Bandcamp – Touch Typed was a very spur the moment (re)interpretation of lowercase meeting with wall noise (or noise in general, for that matter), with some automatic writing in a notepad application being recorded – the release presents the raw sounds alongside a processed (harshened) counterpart.
Some two weeks into the month I hit a bit of a productive streak and began work on a new series of texture-focused wall noise, largely the ambient kind, beginning with Mask of Architectural Excavation which I hosted at my own page. I had the pleasure of hosting the next two at labels who had expressed an interest in having something from me shortly before I began the series – Mask of Hypnos at Gates of Hypnos and Mask of Warming Tendrils at Warm Milk Recordings. The idea of a ‘mask’ here is meant more as an abstract symbol than a specific reference to masks – as the somewhat surreal ‘nature’ of the ‘masks’ might have suggested to the puzzled listener. The nature and purpose of the titles is intentionally enigmatic, I wanted something to mirror the visual style I was developing for this series which involves digitally framed photographs of skies and clouds. I often like to cloud-gaze (especially while listening to HNW) and it often feels to me as though it’s a naturally occurring Rorschach I’m looking at – I wanted both the thematic and the visual elements of this series to evoke this same quality.
Mask of Architectural ExcavationMask of HypnosMask of Warming Tendrils
I have also been quietly working on a few things that haven’t ended up being totally finished in June but are right around the corner in varying degrees – one of these things is finding it’s home at Kenneth Wood’s label Isolationist Recordings and another is going to take hold of the Stoned Demon From Outer Space, a third thing is the fourth in the Mask series which is going to be back at my own page again when it does arrive.
This month also saw the long-overdue return of Jåshlýkk with The Ancient Stone Golem of Adrimelch, a comparatively small album compared to previous works from the project, it felt really good to finally be back in the dungeon synth seat so I’m going to try and make the wait a bit shorter for the next. I also got to use an unearthed and incredibly old illustration I did for it.
May has been and gone and, just as I said I would in my last post, I tried to slow down a lot from the pace of April. I have been incrementally moving towards having new sections to this site to host poetry and illustration work of mine – this is coming along well and I’m excited to publish both. I have also been recording, dubbing and posting for ‘Staticism III – International HNW Tape Swap 2020’, organised by none other than Petar of Fall Into Void Recs.
My offering was called ‘HNW: Rage 158’ and was made with my usual set-up but run through a Peavey Rage 158 amplifier and recorded in my room with a Tascam digital recorder. Below is an image I supplied the participants with of some finished results. I’m quite happy with the sounds contained and I was glad to feel myself getting less rusty with the mechanics and processes of dubbing as I went on with it. It has been a great force of forward momentum and inspiration to encourage me to do more home-dubbing.
At some point in either April or May I re-re-unearthed the ancient relics that were the finished recordings from D.E.S.T.T.C.C.O.L.L.V. – this was a very old collaboration between myself and Erika Leaman, between my Echoes throughout the caverns of Leytonstone alias for ‘dronegaze’ and her now-long-defunct alias for HNW, Distorted Souls Within A Corrupt Vision. A combination of these long-winded aliases create the monstrous amalgam you see in the acronym above – and the collaboration attempted to converge the sounds of the projects as well. The album features guitar drones and static noise from myself and a combination of wall noise, vocal chanting, strings and horns from Erika. Originally conceived in October 2014 and finally wrapped up in August 2016 – I was always really excited to work on this and I have always felt these recordings deserve to be unleashed onto the world. I have begun working on a limited run of tapes to self-release this on when I finally get the artwork ready.
Early in the month, on May 7th, I was happy to rejuvenate the SSN Technologies platform with a new release from an old alias – ENZYME_DYNASTY was in the original five-release batch that kickstarted the platform and it brings me immense pleasure to host this remix/re-working of the timeless Soichi Terada track ‘Time Station’ from the Ape Escape OST – one of the all-time best games to ever come out on the Playstation 1. The artwork is by yours truly.
Later on by the 13th I was happy to introduce Barry C Douglas and Wormhole to HNW alongside the long-awaited return of Hana Haruna. Sadly the only batch-release for the month as I took some time to step back and work on other things – I did receive one further submission in May but as many have now realised I have become supremely obsessed with the three-release batch for this netlabel specifically.
A few days later on the 15th I created a somewhat spur of the moment release that somehow found its way to my actual main Bandcamp page rather than Small Worm. ‘A Night in at the Races’ captures heady and grinding radio abuse (through none other than that same Rage 158) with some experimental digital collage artwork (that I intend to pursue further) – off the back of using similar process in my live-streamed performances on Twitch (and now catalogued on my Youtube) and my creation of the petite ‘Worst Case Scenario’ track for the Quagga Curious Sounds compilation – a true beast of a collection – QCS Loves the NHS. I cannot thank label-head Michael Ridge enough for inviting me to participate – and I’m happy I just so happened to be experiencing some inspiration when the invitation came so I could sneak in to the track-list early before the total avalanche of contribution really began.
Additionally, some things you can expect in early June: the long-delayed resurgence of the biosphere that is Terrarium – thanks to a truly cataclysmic (and very sadly long-delayed) offering from the mighty .birdeater. – and along with the plans for physical release of the above-mentioned collaboration I intend to create some ultra-limited artefacts for Small Worm – thereby ruining every chance it ever had of being considered my fourth netlabel.
I was very happy to introduce smolgostto the worm-fold – the luscious work of Jacob Mahlon of oath&oblation (who has blessed us with such enigmatic and interesting projects as (w)resting place, woundfont, Keen Orator and others still) – as well as to see May in on the very first of the month with a new addition from Rosie King to the bulking Dog Milk roster, Sea Lions.
Finally – I have a sure feeling I’ve forgotten to include something from the past month and I feel bad already for the omission. I will try my best to correct any mistakes in my June post.
My supreme confusion as to how all of April managed to pass by so quickly would appear to be a broad consensus – and when I say broad I mean it appears to know no borders whatsoever. With that said, I’ve hardly got little to show for my time spent this month. In fact I’m not sure ‘leaving some things out in case there’s little to talk about next month’ is a viable option for me moving forward – it would appear this month along with the next few are going to be typified by the realisation of a number of artistic projects that would have usually sat on the shelf forever and ever.
Firstly, I’ve founded a new platform entitled Small Worm. Small Worm has an incredibly broad criteria when it comes to sound – if you make music, anti-music or some kind of sound-based art that is somewhat experimental there is a strong chance I’d like to have it on the platform. The narrowness comes in full effect when it comes to the visual side – all artwork is high contrast, black and white doodling of my own – often I intend to make the artwork as a response to the sounds. As with my previous netlabels – SSN Technologies and Terrarium (which I am trying to continue slowly ambling onward too) – a key facet and impetus for making the platform has been to take on new aliases myself, either publicly or anonymously, and in doing so explore new territory artistically.
Small Worm uses the Bandcamp ‘shell’ of a previous project I began in 2014, and had long abandoned, called The Imaginary Archive. The six releases that make up it’s canon remain but are essentially a ‘living corpse’ at the bottom of the pile. All releases are intentionally enforced ‘free download’. Although, I will of course suggest to visiting artists that they plug other avenues of support if they would like to. So far I have had the pleasure of receiving four such ‘outside hands’ to participate but I am eagerly tying to net a few more. In it’s fetal stage I was not shy to refer to the platform as a netlabel but I have been strongly considering creating some physical gunk for it in the near future (read: next two months). I was especially pleased to welcome Territorial Gobbing of Leeds and Daniel J. Gregory of Aylsebury as they make up a small portion of the kind of audio/visual identity that I would like Small Worm to inhabit. Below is the (main) artwork I created for the former’s Ear Lydre Amex It release.
Secondly, the [SSN] Technologian trilogy I mentioned in my last post was finally birthed on the 14th. You can listen to 𝙸𝙽𝚃𝙴𝚁, 𝙳𝙸𝚂𝙸𝙽𝚃𝙴𝚁, and 𝙳𝙸𝚂𝙸𝙽𝚃𝙴𝙶𝚁𝙰𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽 at the respective links. I cannot thank Creamy Deluxe enough – it was a nice change of pace to have three ready-made visual aids to the creative process and it was nice to finally step back into the [SSN] seat. Below is the artwork they created for the last in the three-part series.
Thirdly, the Roadside Dead revival continued on the 6th with a blackened noise wall re-imagining of Thou’s Changeling – a track which recently had the stems offered up by the band themselves as part of the ISOLATE/CREATE initiative. It is my intention to use the resources provided therein to make a series of other reworks as well, as it’s just too good an opportunity to turn down. I am particularly eager to work with the sounds from Xiu Xiu, Youth Code, Oathbreaker, Hirs, Deafheaven and Daughters. Besides an ‘under wraps’ and ongoing collaborative effort, the project is also set to release a new release entitled ‘Bottomless Depths’, offering more bleak noise wall and shrieking into the void. Below is the somewhat meagre cover artwork I made for it.
Fourthly, the HNW netlabel put out two three-release batches on the 9th and 26th of the month. The first batch contained releases from Ashtabula, Clive Henry and ソーラー菊 (Solar Chrysanthemum). The second batch had releases from Milky Cloud, a split between Körperlich and Godzilla and finally Wormb. I was incredibly pleased to notice that all six are label debuts for the artists involved – with only Clive having appeared on the netlabel before, but only ever on compilations until now. While it may feel like welcoming new faces, I’m coming to realise many artists who submit have been an audience to the netlabel for some time before doing so. I also recently discovered there are 312 people following the Bandcamp, surely my highest count for any of the hoard that I run. I cannot thank everyone who shows support enough nor Luke for founding the platform and choosing myself to act as ‘successor’. The next batch is already two-thirds complete!
Fifthly, I began my experiments with livestreaming noise/performance – I trialled Instagram Live briefly but put a pin in it as I was interested in the high audio quality only possible with direct input which is not a possibility for that medium. Soon after that trial I made a trial of Twitch, the foot-finding for which I also archived here. I settled on Twitch – the first audio archive of recordings from past streams exists here while the videos themselves have been archived on my personal Youtube channel, which also features some very old live performances from a number of my old shows taken by the divine being Elyssa Iona (I seriously cannot thank her enough for all of her time and energy).
I am still very much in the ‘teething’ of realising what it is exactly I want to do with livestreaming as a ‘vessel’ for what I’m already doing. My unending thanks go out to Paolo (PGR) of CyberSOTU for inviting me to take part in that international programme and to Theo of Heinous Whining (every Sat’ 19:00 BST – next has an event here) for inviting me to take part in the fifth edition of his hugely successful livestream series showcasing some of the best and weirdest in the UK and beyond right now. Besides the above the TOPH Housebound series and the Experimental Sound Studio ‘Quarantine Concerts’ have been hugely inspirational in this time and have introduced me to so many amazing artists – there is also a real sense of community in the chatrooms and it has made me feel fairly vindicated in settling with Twitch over Youtube and Instagram (Facebook was OBVIOUSLY never an option).
I have also recently been invited by Giblet Gusset to take part in Isolated Mass #6 – which will be taking place on the seemingly unlikely platform of the Telegram app. As yet this is my only upcoming thing and I intend to slow down considerably as we approach May to take some time to step back, reflect and continue unearthing things on my hard drive and working on things that are impossible ‘live’.
Sixthly (yes, sixthly), a brief note should go to some other April activity – said hard drive unearthing resulted in the publishing of a large body of sounds that serve much more as an archive than they do as an intended listening experience, Perpetual – Unearthed Archival Audio, which digs up audio from 2017 and actually collates it chronologically, taking in sixty-six tracks and likely hours and hours of listening – it’s not something I would recommend attempting in one sitting but it was an interesting and enlightening exercise nonetheless. In that same token, I also produced something supremely unlistenable – Playing Some Tapes On A Broken PYE Vintage Cassette Recorder Model 9103 And Then Trying To Sleep To A Buddhist Lecture And Failing. Perhaps as a direct result of finally diving into more of the catalogue from Bristol label Every Contact Leaves A Trace – albeit a half-baked and overly-ridiculous tribute. I was particularly happy with my photograph for the album’s artwork, though.
Lastly, seventhly, but by no means leastly – on the 3rd of the month I completed a small and nostalgic release entitled ‘The Next Station Is Holborn‘ which focuses on a single train journey I took in February on the London Underground’s Central Line which began around Holborn station and ended around Leyton and Leytonstone. The original recording is levelled and presented as is and is then reworked and reconstituted in the following tracks.
Unsurprisingly, March has turned into a super-productive month for me – where it was shaping up to be that way already, it was also given the added push of a global pandemic causing enforced lock-down and social seclusion. That is the kind of environment my noise has always thrived under and this has been no exception. The increased creative productivity of people in general at this time has been a boon of inspiration – as has the emergence of livestream performance being much more widely taken up. I’ve been toying with the idea of my own livestream for noise/sound but as yet it’s one among many in the nebulous-planning stage.
The end of February and beginning of March saw a resurrection of Dog Milk – a collective formed at its core by myself and Rosie King. Dog Milk is both our alias dedicated exclusively to our collaborations as a duo and the umbrella under which all ‘collective activities’ take place. We take on multiple aliases as solo projects under this umbrella as well as inviting friends to do the same. One such new solo alias of mine has been Metal Machine Rodent – which saw me tackle amplified metal and harsh noise areas I’d been meaning to approach for a while now. Rosie King has recently resurrected the Melodramatic Piss Baby alias as well as breathing new life to Hand Reared Lambs and Fruit Baby. All of this amalgamates around the central resurgence of Dog Milk itself, with its fourth incarnation “A New Dog”.
My blackened noise alias Roadside Dead has not only undergone it’s overhaul but has also proven to be prolific off the bat – with its resurrection release “A Hymn to the Abyssal Plains” being shortly followed by a split release with the amazing A Dying Hermit in the Woods entitled “Beyond Stygian Darkness” – in which the blackened noise meets walled noise sound-palette of the former release is expanded into drone and dark ambient realms. I intend to expand this even further still to encompass field recording and dungeon synth as time progresses. I have a third release entitled “Bottomless Depths” almost ready as well – and the project has been invited to appear on a very special label – I cannot say more than that for the time being but needless to say it is something to seriously look forward to!
I have also had the pleasure of welcoming a great new addition to the SSN Technologies platform – FATAL DREAM ERROR with their vaporwall release Yellow Diamond Codes. I have also commissioned three new artworks from Creamy Deluxe to use for an upcoming three-part series on the netlabel – you can view these artworks already at the artist’s Instagram. The series is entirely a solo project of mine, using a new one-off alias, [SSN] Technologian, a somewhat indirect response to the [SSN] Technologist alias of 2016 that brought longform “crackle studies” to the platform. (Artwork pictured below by Atari Seagrave-Blood).
I have also had a new batch of releases for the HNW netlabel as well as it’s fourth themed compilation – Unseen, Unheard – the first in many years and a welcome return to the format! I have been considering drafting an open call for a fifth edition, themed around isolation and seclusion – this time the open call will be a tad more rigorous and actually use the Facebook platform and so you might expect more than thirteen tracks for that one.
Much more has been happening behind the scenes as well! But I won’t give too much away here as I need to keep some things under wraps if I’m going to have enough material to keep monthly posting a reality.
S H E A R M A N 