‘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
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
Another artschool project to post up here. If you follow the link, it explains the brief and my concept. It is in flash (as per the brief) so apologies to the iPhone peoples as it won’t work.
The more eagle eyed/die-hard among you might have already picked up the rather good 2010 Mixtape from Highpoint Lowlife which features some greatness by some of my favourite musicians such as Erik XVI (with TVO on the dub), some ghostly anti-wobble from Production Unit, some of Mandelbrot’s new noisy as fuck guitar histrionics and the enigmatic legend that is 10-20, everytime I hear new stuff by him it just blows me away, awesome. Oh yeah, there’s also a little bit of new Erstlaub on there which must mean……
Yep, consider this announced! Sleepwalking into the Underworld will be coming out on Highpoint Lowlife this year, plans at present are to do a DVDr release with the full visuals but we still have a few things to iron out before I can say for certain. You’ll know more when I do.
<3
D
Just a little (slightly late) note to thank everyone who came out to see me at Hidden Door the other week. Apologies if I didn’t really get to speak to you or you thought I was a bit heavy on the scowls, I do tend to have to get a bit too much mentally “into character” sometimes for it to all come together and, I think I managed to pull it off. Word from the floor was I had a captivated audience of about 30 people or so locked in for most of the 40 minutes (including a couple of Sunday afternoon snoozers!).
Extra special thanks to Alastair Cook, amazingly nice man, new friend and something of a renaissance man for dragging me out of inactivity and asking me to take part, it spurred me on to create a whole new piece especially for it. It was genuinely moving to hear about his personal experience with my music, it’s the sort of thing that actually makes it feel like it’s all worth it. His Malin set was absolutely wonderous, bass heavy, deep, dark, as soon as he started playing, I realised why we’d been getting on so well. He has an exhibition of his beautiful landscape photography on display at the moment in Sutherland, go see it if you can.
A rather nice review of the Sunday afternoon activities over at the enjoyably frank and generally well informed Que Belle Epoque blog.
“This was intended to be a review of the entire extensive programme at the Hidden Door Art Festival this weekend in Edinburgh. Unfortunately, due to a comical projectile vomiting bug (it wasn’t comical at the time, but it was of the variety that is generally used to comical effect) I only made it down for a few hours on Sunday afternoon. However, I did still manage to catch one of the main reasons for my interest in the event, an Edinburgh debut from Erstlaub, who was showing a new live set.
Prior to Erstlaub it also worth mentioning Alastair Cook’s new Malin project; although I only caught the second half due to some last-minute programme changes. In that short space of time he managed to summon sufficient bass-y growl to send my girlfriend (who had endured the same vomiting affliction) into the bowel-comforting shelter of the poetry room. Malin matched his music to a variety of collected visual recordings, including the familiar view along the East Coast Mainline, focus shifting between the dirty GNER windows and the passing landscape, with the occasional fleeting glimpses of the sea. This worked well with the music, a gentle static patchwork interwoven with passing interludes of children speaking, guitar melodies, hushed vocals and heartier (gut-wrenching?) bass drones. The result was a beautiful scrapbook of field recordings and electronic manipulation. A man of numerous talent, as well as commissioning and curating a number of artists for the event (including Erstlaub), Al has an exhibition of his photography of Sutherland and Caithness opening next week in Helmsdale.
After a wander around the rest of the artwork I returned to the basement for Erstlaub’s set. Dave Fyans, the artist/creator of Erstlaub, describes his music as ‘Scottish drone-based miserablism’ which is enough to pique my interest, a bit of dour ambiance is always lovely on a Sunday afternoon. However this description probably does something of a disservice to his music, which is much more emotionally complex.
He performed a new piece called ‘Sleepwalking Into The Underworld‘, accompanied by a series of wintry images of forests and streams. The volume and depth of the noise he managed to create were difficult to associate with the laptop and array of electronic devices set out on the table before him. These were noises you would associate with much larger entities; the creaking of a forest at the beginning of a storm, wind ripping across a body of water, the hum of distant factories. It is all the more impressive that the sounds were entirely built from modular synthesis, without the help of samples or field recordings.
The set started with a low hum and a re-occurring whipping squall, soon followed by distant tribal drums emanating from deep within the monochrome forest. The drums reappeared later seemingly to mark shifts in the movement of noise as Fyans shepherded his sounds around the projected landscape. Frequencies continued to build and collide into great masses of physical noise; only towards the end of the set a confused and disoriented electronic gurgle appeared to remind you of the real source of the sound. His 40-minute set seemed to drift past very quickly indeed, leaving me to consider what actually constituted ‘natural’ sound.
Get more Erstlaub here, lots of treats to download including the excellent ‘In Darkened Corners‘ EP. If you enjoy that look out for his releases on the Highpoint Lowlife label, amongst others.”
In addition to Malin, my other highlight of the festival was a brief performance by the poet JL Williams whose cutup verbal imagery and beautiful American/Scottish tonality cut through my performance anxiety and soothed and held me captive. We’ve briefly touched on the possibility of working together if the right project occurs, lets wait and see.
News coming soon on a reissue of a quite difficult to get album (due to being on a terrible label the first time) on MFR and a possible new release on HPLL to follow once my legal team have finished negotiations (ie. once I get my finger out and reply to some emails/send some discs places).
<3
D
I’m escaping out into the real world to subject members of the human race to a completely new set of bleeps and rumbles in a few weeks time. I’m playing in the afternoon of Sunday 31st January at the Hidden Door festival in Edinburgh (my first Edinburgh show actually).
The set and accompanying visuals were largely constructed in a pique of bleak mid-winterness so expect an even higher than normal noise/grumbling ratio. Here is a little preview to give you an idea of what to expect.
Please do come, it looks like it’s going to be a really interesting event, if you do, be nice to me eh?
D