Tagged: hiddenshoal

Ahead of next May's release of the new Monocle album Transpacific Sound Paradise (co-produced and engineered by Scott Solter), the band's leader Rich Bennett and vocalist Ana Breton (also of Dead Leaf Echo and ex Mahogany) have produced the first episode of a tasty new podcast called ' Please Hold The Elevator '. Rich describes the show perfectly: "Lounge, muzak, exotica, library, Brazilian and everything else on the fringes, 'Please Hold The Elevator' takes an hour to delve into the music that so many consider "background," revealing craft, [...]

KBRP (Arizona) loving for Hidden Shoal as Gilded get a CMJ rotation add , Slow Dancing Society sit at 22 on the Top 30 and Elisa Luu sits at number 4 and Slow Dancing Society number 7 on the Electronic Chart. Go team!

Gilded 's stunning debut album Terrane has been garnering a plethora of plaudits all over the shop lately. Well, when I say 'shop' I mean 'Internet'. And more specifically, websites Delusions of Adequacy , Fluid Radio and Cool Perth Nights . There's also a rather excellent track-by-track article on Mess+Noise . And, if that wasn't enough, Gilded recently launched the album in Perth and are coming to other Australian cities later in the month. How good is that? Super-good. Tour dates as follows: Saturday 20 October @ The [...]

I’m no geologist, but thanks to a bit of search-engine scholarship I can now tell you that a “terrane” is a land-mass phenomenon where a tectonic plate breaks off and fuses with another, leaving a fault-line where the two bits of Earth-crust have “sutured.” The metaphorical inference to be made here – that collaborators Adam Trainer and Matt Rosner’s respective approaches/oeuvres are comparable to tectonic plates, monolithic, timeless, and joined at last – might seem a touch self-important if not for a few facts. (A) Adam and Matt are well-known to be top dudes, tirelessly honing their crafts for years [...]

Piano. Bowed metal. Percussion. Repetition. Space. Texture… These are our basic ingredients; our oil, salt, pepper, spice, flour, water. We can draw on one tradition, or another – personal, geographic, familial. Our tools, our skillets, griddles, pans; these are our experience, our context, and our time. Whatever the combination, we try to make something. Trying to work out what that is, why that record is good, why this one is a disappointment, why this one we will play again and again, depends on so much, can be such a personal decision, that in the end, the [...]

Sometimes I’m unsure exactly where to start with writing about an album. On other occasions, the band/musicians make things if not exactly easy then perhaps at least partially apparent, signposting their music through identifiable types of genre and style, and allowing music writers to spend fewer hours attempting to categorize what they’re listening to. But if ever a music label chose its name well, that label is Hidden Shoal. Based in the Australian city of Perth, it’s a name that invokes ideas about the unseen, about the less than obvious, and if you expect that their output contains much in [...]

Excerpt (translated from the German): "On his new album On,  Markus Mehr proves that he is a master of a variety of electronic styles. The sounds are so varied, from quiet, undulating movements to unclassifiable industrial sounds. The eight instrumental pieces come with their own dynamics and often rouse the listener back from feeling relaxed... An album of sonic experiments, beautiful melodies and creativity." Der Horspeigel

Arguably the track that brings Mehr's On into clearest focus is the penultimate one, “Monks On The Beach,” less for the irreverence of its title than for the conceptual MO evidenced by its construction—specifically the idea of pairing Gregorian Chant with animated, field-recorded conversations in a single piece. In contrast to its predecessor, In , the first part of Mehr's In-On-Off triptych, On doesn't present two long-form compositions but instead eight experimental constructions of more modest length ( Off , featuring a single, forty-nine-minute epic, is scheduled for early 2013 [...]

Wizards of Time have crafted a unique, powerful musical experience with Hidden Shoal’s 2012 release  Will The Soft Curse Plague On?  Here is apocalyptic concept record through shimmering sounds.  Andrew Levi Hiller and company have made one of the best albums of 2012 (as of right now the main competition would be Swans  The Seer  in my book).   Will The Soft Cure Plague On? was created in North Carolina with highly esteemed producer/musician Scott Solter .  The band traveled back and forth over the course of months perfecting their psychedelic pop sounds. [...]

The cover art gets you started — standing in a tall building, looking at the city through huge windows as the sun lies low on the horizon, the moment stretching out. Elisa Luu's music has this sense of intimacy and discovery about it, something like swimming underwater with a school of porpoises, but with a deep intelligence that’s never sentimental or sanctimonious. There are definitely no pan flutes or whale songs in Luu’s ambient creations, as they are composed of synthetic, impossible-to-identify electronic gestures. Her tool kit of curious, tactile sounds continually catch you off guard; you’re always trying to figure out [...]

Excerpt (translated from the German): "After In, the impressive start to the trilogy, On , the middle section, has appeared, composed of slight dissonance, breathtaking drones and diverse field recordings, together creating a brilliant soundtrack to the listener's own cinema of the imagination... Based in Augsburg, Markus invites the listener on a journey through his own emotional world, vividly rendered in experimental sound art... The majority of the compositions comprise distorted guitar drones, synthesizer, effects and field recordings. Overall, this is a very entertaining work, veering between comforting and bewildering... After the pure exhilaration of In, [...]

If you're lucky enough to be in the beautiful city of Stockholm this weekend, then you must get along to the Stoff (Fringe) Festival . Markus Mehr is playing on Friday night, with Stefanie Sixt on visuals. This will be Markus and Stefanie's third time playing there - it's going to be tremendous!

Wizards of Time 's stunning debut opus Will the Soft Curse Plague On? has just received glowing reviews at 402 Productions and Luna Kafe . Visit the Hidden Shoal Store to stream the album in full, download free single 'Little's Jingle' (which you can stream below), and order the album in digital and CD formats.

Will The Soft Curse Plague On?  is about as easy of a question to answer as the band’s past. There isn’t too much to dig up on Wizards Of Time other than their hometown of Phoenix, Arizona. Andrew Hiller leads this quintet of indie rockers into their debut album whose release was seen by no other than the exquisite Hidden Shoal Recordings. The vague back history that went into developing this record is a bit odd; with the band itself forming and playing shows in 2008, they snagged studio time two years later to complete this LP in 2010. Either they [...]

A few moonths ago I was blown away by Wizards of Time's "Little's Jingle" , the amazing first single off this, their debut album. It's art-rock, it's prog-pop, and it's a conceptual album. To quote Hidden Shoal: 'They are the music makers, the makers of music, the slingers of sound. They are the Wizards Of Time...' Will The Soft Curse Plague On? has got 18 tracks on it, of which 6 are short, instrumental 'intermissions' call 'plagues' ("Plague 13 through "Plague 63). This leaves 12 regular songs, and producer/engineer [...]

The first two parts of a planned triptych (the third, Off , will release in January 2013), Markus Mehr ’s  In and Out are studies in extreme contrast. Effective, listen-worthy contrast. In is the comparatively quieter of the two, made up of two long tracks. 'Komo' is built on a simple string phrase that patiently repeats itself while Mehr folds in new layers and levels. On top of that, it’s subjected to Mehr’s sonic surgery. The sound drops out or muffles, gets cut up and reordered. There is a stretch [...]

Markus Mehr has history with The Underground of Happiness. I interviewed him a couple of years ago, over the phone from his home in Augsburg, at the time of his Lava album, a brilliant, subterranean slow burn of drones, clicks and screeches. His main instrument is guitar, something which is not at all obvious from the sounds he makes. Since Lava , Mehr has embarked on something of a landmark project, a triptych of albums, which are at least semi-conceptual. On is the 2nd in the sequence, following In , with [...]

Woah, what happened here?  After the two long, ambient, loop-based tracks of  In  (the first part of a triptych, reviewed here earlier this year), we expected more of the same.  But with  On , Germany’s  Markus Mehr  is  really  on ~ in fact, this is the best thing we’ve ever heard from him.  And while  In  hinted at drone without toppling over,  On  can only be categorized as experimental.  It’s certainly not ambient. Boom-be-boom, saw-saw: this is how the opening piece, 'I’m Gonna Make You Love Me', begins.  It’s an industrial track.  No, wait, [...]

"a cornucopia of samples, field recordings and distorted drones, and is highly recommended to fans of William Basinski, Tim Hecker and Fennesz." My Old Kentucky Blog

In comprises just two pieces that together span over 50 minutes. It begins with quiet electronic sounds, creating a rather depressing mood, then proceeds into a meditative space. It's experimental, too, with looped melodies, synthesizers and alien sounds, creating an interesting listening experience if the listener enjoys following sonic paths. Der Horspiegel