For those unfamiliar, Bandcamp Friday is a sometimes monthly event where Bandcamp waive their revenue share from sales to help support artists and labels affected by the pandemic. I haven't made one of these recommendation lists for a while, but with Bandcamp Fridays relaunching in about eight hours, I thought it would be a good idea to throw some support behind the initiative again. Anyway, let's crack into it.
In 1983, the award-winning Australian sound artist and composer Dr Ros Bandt and LIME (Live Improvised Music Events) made a set of three long-form sound pieces for Melbourne's longstanding Move Records called Soft & Fragile. Several decades on, fellow Melbourne label Efficient Space has reissued the collection with lush new cover art. These three pieces see Ros and her collaborators playing complex, interlocking rhythms on a set on homemade instruments, clay and metal bells and tape loops. People talk about ambient music as a space or a way of shifting the atmosphere of a space, but these pieces are closer to geometrical reconstructions of spaces (real or imagined) and they sound beautiful.
I seem to have missed this at the time, but Music From Memory's October 2021 release is quite the treat and well-worth exploring if you haven't already. Oumuamua, the second instalment in MLM's Virtual Dreams series is a compilation of wide-ranging compilation of stargazed, deep space music recorded by British electronic pioneers MLO aka Peter Smith and Jon Tye between 1993 and 1995. At the time, they were coming off the back of having been hired to produce an Icelandic pop star in the early-90s, and they had some serious studio gear on deck. References here include minimalism, new age, Cluster and Eno. Really lush, lovely and fancy-free.
Man, Time Capsule and Séance Centre knocked it out of the ballpark with this one. Lèspri Ka : New Directions in Gwoka Music from Guadeloupe 1981-2010 is one of those ones where the title says it all really. Across ten tracks, curators Cédric Lassonde & Brandon Hocura explore thirty years of gwoka music, in the process highlighting the radical and innovative spirit of the musicians of
Guadeloupe. The phrase life-affirming is often overused, but this music really is.
A reissue of Japanese Kankyō Ongaku composer and record label owner Akira Ito's Marine Flowers (Science Fantasy) album? Sign me up. Ito composed the music contained in this release to accompany a 1986 documentary about marine wildlife filmed in Palau and commissioned by Pionner's Laser Disc campaign. As lush and free-flowing as the name suggests, over the last three and a half decades, its calming soundworld has slowly cultivated a cult following among those who've followed the Japanese ambient scene down the pathway to the zen garden. Music to slip away with.
This stuff just feels so good. Diligent as always, Adelaide's Isle of Jura label has put carefully put together Instrumental Dubs #1, another one of those collections that does what it says on the lid. Over five sounds, they map out a series of dubbed-out version excursions through a small-but-perfectly formed selection of out-of-print reggae, disco, boogie and house deep cuts. All killer, no filler.
Antipodean label Strangelove comes through once again, with a three-tracker of mid-80s proto-future pop from Cologne trio Romie Singh. It's pop not slop, disco not disco and very much the sort of record you want in your bag when you're out on the beach searching for the Balearic beat. Dancing To Forget is available on pre-order at the moment, and I believe Strangelove will be announcing another new (maybe old) record very soon.
Washington D.C's Lifted (Max D & Matt Papich and friends) return for 2022 with the simply titled 3, which is of course the follow-up to the two EPs they released in 2020 and 2021. Cinematic field recordings (or field recording reconstructions) meets ambient synthesis, upright bass, Rhodes, digital dub, man-machine club rhythms and everything else you can fit in the kitchen sink. It's journey music, maybe even chose your own adventure music. Which pathway will you go down with Lifted?
This one is another reissue, but what a reissue it is! Detroit legend Neil Ollivierra aka The Detroit Escalator Company's 1996 album Soundtrack [313] + 6, originally released through Ferox Records, gets a second life with Switzerland's Mental Groove Records / Musique Pour La Danse. At the time, they called it an ambient techno masterpiece, and a couple of decades on, the accolades still ring true. Soundtrack [313] + 6 is futurism that hasn't collapsed into retrofuturism. If you're unfamiliar, but enjoy Global Communications, Black Dog, Manuel Goettsching, Tangerine Dream, Susumu Yokota or Klaus Schulze, it's well worth the listen.
Good ole Max Essa has re-upped his long-form modern Balearic classic Panorama Suite, originally released through the Is It Balearic? label in 2010. Twenty minutes of clear blue skies, open coastal roads, soft white sands, palm trees and general good times. Do you hear that beat building in the background? That's the best party on the island. We should really get there for sunset.
