| 1 | Gaps in the persistent hiss | 20:21 |
When the covid-19 pandemic started, in a mixture of distress and concern, it was hard to block out the imagination and its ability to dream up how far things could go. In what feels like a lost tape from a field trip in nuclear fallen-out land, Malvern Brume paints a world seemingly abated. Occasional muffled dictaphone note-taking punctuates caustic interruptions, cryptic utterances, the hollow chime of steel panelling, the movement of 'something' under the gravelly surface. When the journey comes to an end, a crescendo of static noise comes to fore and we hear the splash of water, it becomes apparent that wherever we are is fairly similar to where we are right now.
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All sounds recorded in London between April and March 2020 during lockdown. Made using various instruments, devices, field recordings and objects including; a synthesiser, modified violin and penny whistle, balloons, tape recorders, bird whistles, bells, a sampler, gardening tools, E3 dawn chorus and other materials found around the house. Both poems were written in response to walks through Victoria park during lockdown.
All music recorded, mixed & mastered by Malvern Brume.
Cover design by Oliver Barrett.
"Low Company hard kru gets it’s hands on some of the most abundant “demos” we’ve heard in a loooong time, a recalibrating collection of hermetic sound collage and suspensive beat cycles that form the far-reaching, street-lamp sonics on “C.C.S. Ear-well” - the first outing of London based shut-in Malvern Brume and the maiden voyage on a cobbled together, in-house, hand scalpel’ing, carbon based farce / tape label.
A near sixty minute long Greenwich Tunnel Dive, “C.S.S...” is a set of lost transmissions on MB’s fading vitality and experiments in sun-starved, solitary fitness. From the off, the opening track “Pedestrian Movement” feels like a last legible journal entry, a pensive and melodic inquisition before rasping, Diesel Guitar-style drone descents and inaudible S.O.S. signals take hold and tracks become fully shrouded in a malnourished distortion, dusted with fluttering memoirs of the real-world via some rickety, smoke stained London field recordings.
Side B morphs into more paranoid, beat-sequenced skeletons - “Tascam 1081” and “Ebb” feeling like hissing inversions of the German Shepherds’ “Music For Sick Queers”, whilst “Unrooted Drum” and “Mud Lap” take the shape of an unidentified strain of slickly modulating, claustrophobic techno - like something you might find on Morphine - an erratic yet intuitive tekno-primitivism, Brume going mad in captivity and simultaneously developing an acute understanding for his craft. "
