‘The Last Few Seconds Before Sleep’ has taken form. The last piece of the puzzle fell into place this morning and after a bit of a rebuild, I recorded it. Here’s a little taster from the full 40ish minutes for you as promised.
The Last Few Seconds Before Sleep (Excerpt) by Erstlaub
The piece will be performed in its entirety at the n_ilk festival at the Botanic Gardens in Dundee in just under a few weeks time. Ticket info and more details on their website.
D
So, just a short update on a few things.
Tickets are now on sale for the n_ilk Festival in the Botanic Gardens in Dundee on Saturday, September 11th. Priced at just £6 for a whole day’s worth of great music in an awesome location, you can get tickets at the University Store online here or from Grouchos from 25th August 2010 and in the PLUS@Dundee marquee outside DUSA during the week leading up to the event. Get on it. I’ll be performing ‘The Last Few Seconds Before Sleep’ which I’ve been tweaking away at and is really beginning to take on it’s own form.
On the same day, excerpts from two of my longer pieces ‘I Am The Line Drawn In The Sand Between The Living And The Dead’ and the forthcoming DVD release ‘Sleepwalking Into The Underworld’ will be shown as part of -SCAPE at the Alchemy Film Festival in Hawick which has been curated by the ever awesome Alastair Cook. -SCAPE runs from 9-11pm at Beanscene, Hawick, free entry.
I’ve finally got around to opening up a Souncloud account to take a bit of strain off of my meagre hosting and have posted up two full live sets including a never before heard performance from ‘Towards The Singularity’ at Cafe Oto, London in August 2008, at which I premiered ‘I Am The Line…’. I’m hoping to get some snatches of ‘Last Few Seconds…’ recorded soon that I’ll also post there.
D
Work is well underway on the next big project for me - “The Last Few Seconds Before Sleep” which is starting to take shape properly now. Here’s the conceptual schtick behind it:
Just before sleep, in the Limbo between the conscious mind and the great abyss, I become aware of a tiny sound. A minute burst of white noise lasting just a few seconds in linear time, this is the gap between worlds. Aware but powerless to act, I know this sound inside out, a minute piece of sonic cartography that contains all the information in the universe, the whirring of a vast organic hard-drive as the processor performs a memory dump between logic and something much bigger and weirder. delay lines feedback to Omega Point, choirs of particles stream towards event horizons, linear time holds no sway here this vast but tiny sound contains all of time and space and possibility.
It will be getting its first (and possibly only) live airing on September 11th at the n_ilk festival at the Botanic Gardens in Dundee and will be coming out on Broken20 at somepoint thereafter. There will also be a full set from The Village Orchestra and we’re planning on pulling together a bit of improvised collaboration, there should also be a DJ set from Production Unit so Broken20 ends will be fully repped, all taking place inside a big greenhouse full of quite mental plants. The event runs from 3.30pm - 10.30ish and there are a load of other interesting people doing things.
n_ilk site
Facebook listing
LastFM listing
Do come along. In the meantime, I cannot recommend heartily enough Erik XVI’s latest podcast for Broken20 which you can get here. Techno classics under heavy sedation in a dark tunnel. Get on it.
D
Just a little influx update really.
I’ve just relocated Erstlaub HQ to a lovely new flat in Dundee which I’m sharing with wonderful fellow TBA student Rebecca Clark. If you’d like to send me any nice things by way of a housewarming present then hit me up via the usual channels and I’ll give you our address.
I’ve finally dragged my lazy arse back into some sort of productive position and have made the DVD menu for Sleepwalking Into The Underworld and posted off the master copy to Highpoint Lowlife. I know I’ve been banging on about this for what feels like an eternity but I promise there will be release news soon.
On HPLL, at the risk of coming over all weepy, in light of Th0rsten’s not terribly recent announcement to wind down operations, I just want to thank everyone who’s been involved and supported the label over the years. It’s an amazing thing as an artist to be involved with a label who have given us the belief, support and room to grow without any hassle whatsoever. I’m genuinely proud of the releases we’ve done together and hope that Sleepwalking proves a fitting requiem to our time working together. It’s pretty corny but over the years, Th0r and Mat and all the other artists have become like family to me. I wish everyone that’s been involved all the best on new endeavours and look forward to sharing them here. //weep
So, phoenixlike, we move onto new things with Broken20. I’ve started preliminary builds of some new pieces, I don’t quite have my concept nailed down yet but am pretty confident that its nature will reveal itself in the coming weeks. Keep an eye out for developments and maybe some cheeky exclusive sketches as they develop. There’s some amazing artists on the roster and some fantastic releases in the pipeline so watch these spaces.
I’m without proper, regular internet for another month until Rupert Murdoch’s evil henchmen come and connect my internet so communications may be sparing for a little while (although not sure if it’ll be any more noticeable than usual).
Hertz
D
Sometimes it’s interesting when things claw their way out of the graves they lie in…
One of the first albums that was formed as Erstlaub that falls under my current continuum was The Long Road which has just been made available for free as part of the BrokenZero series. Special thanks to Sietse for the archive rip seeing as the physical copies in existence seem to be turning to dross in the sunlight and refusing to become digital.
The Long Road
“Sometime in 2006, Erstlaub finally crawled out from the internal wreckage, fully formed and bristling with very specific intentions. The Long Road marked the end of one journey and the beginning of another. The systems had been honed, the process refined, the trials undertaken, it was time to transmute pure thought and will into sound.
The movements and passages contained within it are generally of a subtle, calmer nature with a focus on texture and interplay between modulations but at times configure themselves into a quite daunting amount of quiet noise. The Long Road was performed once in October 2006 in Augsburg, Germany, the first public appearance of Erstlaub.
The Long Road was created on a Nord Modular G2 using a Evolution UC33 midi controller and a Boss DD20 delay unit, it was recorded in one live take with no additional processing or overdubs.”
Get it here.
Remember you can show us some Broken20 love via facebook, twitter or indeed by the healing power of positive thinking (well maybe just the first two then).
D
My first ever podcast was posted up last week on the Broken20 site. Loosely mixed without any sort of permissions but done so with the utmost respect and intent. Here’s the tracklisting.
Erstlaub – On Becoming Invisible
For our first podcast Dundee-based artist Erstlaub kicks things off with an hour or more of dark drone, ambient and post-rock textures. It features an exclusive excerpt from the first release on the label.
Basil Kirchin – Once Upon a Time
Oneohtrix Point Never – Physical Memory
The Zephyr Skate Team – Horse Walking
Tim Hecker – Paragon Point
Slowdive – Souvlaki Space Station
Windy & Carl – Lighthouse
Dirty Hope – Turtles
Stars of the Lid – Virginia (20.30)
Throbbing Gristle – Perception Is The Only Reality
TVO – We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (excerpt)
Dopplereffekt – Hyperelliptic Surfaces
Kraftwerk – Kometenmelodie 2
Samoyed – Simmer Lunt
The Caretaker – Friends Past Re-United
Angelo Badalamenti – Blue Frank
Direct link is here on the Broken20 site or here’s the feed so you can subscribe to the series via your iTunes .
The Long Road will be coming very soon as part of the BrokenZero series.
D
I am pleased to announce that my long term nemesis and occassional techno and sushi partner The Village Orchestra is launching a new label.
Here’s the website chatter
“Broken20 is a new label from ruaridhTVO, with assistance from production unit and erstlaub
Broken20 will release all sorts of music. Rather than be genre-tied, we will be releasing music rooted in a particular aesthetic – releases concerned with decay, erosion, entropy, mistakes and errors, line noise and tape hiss, hum and buzz.
We’ll primarily be a digital download label, although there will be forays into highly limited cd- and dvd-r variants of our releases. We hope to eventually release some vinyl editions.”
I’ve already put together a little selection which will appear imminently as a podcast which takes in fizzy electronics, gloomy post-rock, bleeps, the occasional rumble and some other junk that represents the sort of noise that takes place in my head on a daily basis. Also coming very soon will be my album “The Long Road” which was originally a self released CDR back sometimes around, um, 2005 or 6 maybe which was so limited in edition that I’m not even sure I have my own copy anymore. It’ll be coming up on the BrokenZero section of the site for free. I’ll probably post up when they are both avaialble.
In the meantime, you can keep up with the label’s general wackness of chat via its twitter feed.
From me in the relative future then, lookout for:
I’ll see you in the morgue I guess, mine’s a rum and coke.
D
Just a wee thanks to all the people who came out to see me do my thing at n_ilk the other week. I performed Sleepwalking into the Underworld in it’s entirety along with the projected side of it. I also managed to try out a new finish I’d been thinking about which builds a few minutes of noise into a solid mass, draws it out and then just pulling the plug at the right moment leaving both a sonic and visual vacuum, I think it worked out not bad. From a personal point of view, I think it might have been my best performance yet. I had a couple of very brief moments of awareness but in the main I was surrendered to Erstlaub and lost inside the sound, it got pretty dark in there at moments.
Huge thanks to my man Steven James Herd who took some pics of me in action.
D
Word!
Just finished my last project of the semester. Just need to write up some sketchbooks stuff, present it for assessment next week and it’s game over on 2nd Year TBA.
There’s a bit more exposition over at the Youtube page.
Remember I’m playing in Dundee next week, it’s in Drouthy’s rather than Braes as I earlier thought. Details here.
D
Just incase you don’t already have a copy (shame on you!), you can now pick up Broadcasting on Ghost Frequencies here from the ever awesome Norman Records along with some other gems from the MFR catalogue. Here’s what Phil had to say about it.
“We got a bunch of CD’s in this week on the Moving Furniture label. I picked one up with my eyes closed and I got Erstlaub. Nice. It’s called Broadcasting on Ghost Frequencies and that’s exactly what it is! It sounds like a load of harsh white noise with something trying to break through. All I can think of is that small woman from Poltergeist with the creepy voice now. It’s well intense and a total journey if you stick with it to the end of this 48 minute headfuck as you’ll traverse many spectral planes and feel totally drained afterwards. Just like I do now….”
That’ll do me
Hertz
D