“Hissing Waves” by The Leaf Library

UK ensemble The Leaf Library are about to release a new album, “The World Is A Bell”, another (giant) step in their on-going journey to perfect their unique style of folk-ambient melodic drone-pop. Here’s the radio edit of the first single from the album, “Hissing Waves”:

The Leaf Library style is built on hypnotic repetitive intertwining of rhythms, electric and acoustic instruments, textures and tones, and voices. It’s still more ambient/ experimental electronic folk pop than psychedelic rock or electronica, however this new album leads The Leaf Library into new even more experimental territory.

“The World Is A Bell” is an engaging and immersive meditation in accessible exploratory minimalist melodic drone-based music.  The double-helix spiral strands of music and voice twist and loop around on themselves, each track providing distinctive sonic DNA flowing between two elements.

At one extreme is the beautiful minimalist assembling of acoustic woodwind instruments and complex poly-rhythmic percussion into mathematical patterns, reminiscent at times of some of the quieter side of early Tortoise. At the other end of The Leaf Library’s drone spectrum the textures are more industrial, like a fleet of giant intergalactic hovercraft lawnmowers arriving on Earth from another planet, providing an unexpected Stars of The Lid level sonic experience of layered and soothing metal machine music.

“Hissing Waves”, with it’s twin-voiced lyrical meditation on “an endless looping cycle” of space and time, sits somewhere in the middle between the organic pastoral mood at one extreme and the mechanical hum at the other.  It serves as a perfect introduction to this enigmatic and individual album.

“The World Is A Bell” is released on WIAIWYA on 25 October 2019.

“You Are Missed” by Residue

Continuing the instrumental guitar music theme from a few days ago, here’s something new from the darkest corners of Dunedin’s noise underground. This 5 track album – “Rotting In The Stomach of Melancholy” – by Residue is a dark, wordless masterpiece and our introduction is the symphonic melodic minimalism of the first track “You Are Missed”

“You Are Missed” is sombre and majestic with a heavy and dark grace. Guitar notes washed in cathedral reverb swell and fade and gentle waves of white noise ebb and flow. “Commit Your Body to Dust” is an even sparser but equally beautiful atmospheric drone before “You Are Mist” completes the mood by enveloping those swelling guitars in a sonic mist of white noise.

After this relative calm all hell breaks loose on the final two tracks and sonic metallurgists will rejoice. Dense layers of distorted guitars and feedback create two saturated epics. The final track – the album’s title track – is a churning, fiery monster, several atmospheres heavier than Fripp and Eno’s “An Index of Metals”, and fine material for readjusting the atomic structure of your brain via headphones.

It’s a self-contained sonic world that may not be for everyone, but is likely to appeal to fans of atmospheric sound explorers like Labradford and Stars of the Lid, and worth a visit by the adventurous, the curious and the brave.