We’re halfway through this year’s Joyzine Advent Calendar! Yesterday was our biggest festive giveaway yet as we announced two upcoming co-promoted gigs with Sonic Tonic at Paper Dress Vintage in 2022 with free downloads from Firestations, The Leaf Library, Shattercones, Maggie The Cat and Naomi In Blue – get them all here. Today’s duo of downloads comes from an established independent label with a penchant for the experimental.
As always, the tracks are completely free to download and there’s no need to sign up to any mailing lists to access the songs (though if you’d like to you can join ours here), but if you’re enjoying the tunes we’d love you to make a donation to the wonderful charity Help Musicians, who offer health and welfare support to musicians at all stages of their lives.
Let’s find out who’s providing the tunes today…
Veteran indie label Cruel Nature Records has been releasing music from the outer reaches for almost a decade and today they’ve provided tracks from two of their artists, Distant Animals and Omnibael. We’ll hand over to them to explain the tracks.
The Ghost of Christmas Present: Cruel Nature Records exists in the overlap between avante garde and outsider art. The label started in 2013 and has released over 100 albums from artists the world over.
The Ghost of Christmas Past: Earlier this month, on 3rd December, Cruel Nature released album, The Frequency of the Heart at Rest by Distant Animals. And, exclusive to Joyzine, is a video for the track ‘Hyperacusis’, taken from that album, along with a free download of the track itself.
The Frequency of the Heart at Rest uses a custom tuning system (based upon multiplications of the frequency of the human heart whilst sleeping) to construct a dense, enigmatic sound world. Modular synthesis, alongside violins, trumpets, and percussion, are processed through reels of analogue tape, the speed of their playback on the tape adjusted in order to match the works bespoke tuning system. Parts have been re-recorded several times over, their distinct tonalities bleeding into one another to create a unified, claustrophobic sonic tapestry.
Drawn from the composer’s own battles with extreme sleep loss – waking as often as every 15 minutes throughout the night for a period of almost 3 years – the work encapsulates the haze of the perpetual tired. Snatches of pleasant, nostalgic melodies filter through a wall of grit and noise, the result of the repeated over-dubbing of reels, an increasingly worn tape medium burying whatever clarity there might once have been in an endless wash of artifacts and decay.
Merging minimal neo-classicism with drone, minimal electronica, noise, glitch and sound design, the album offers a tense and fragile journey through a disparate, impoverished landscape, the soundtrack invoking a sensory world always on the brink of collapse.
Download ‘Hyperacusis‘
The Frequencey of The Heart At Rest is out now on Cruel Nature Recordings – order via Bandcamp
The Ghost of Christmas Future: Early next year Cruel Nature will be announcing the debut album from Omnibael. During the formative stages of writing new material for this, the duo recorded a live session at Hohm Recording Studio. Exclusive to Joyzine is a video for the track ‘The Repetition’, taken from that session, along with a free download of the track itself.
“‘The Repetition’ started life as a fairly straightforward Kraut-rock improv, which we kept working on until it had more of its own character, but that insistent ‘this is where we are and we’re not moving’ Kraut-rock feel is still central to the track.“
Download ‘The Repetition‘
The tracks from the Hohm session are available as a 12” vinyl EP on Bandcamp.
If you enjoy today’s tracks, please consider making a donation to Help Musicians
Come back tomorrow for more exclusive tracks + check out the tracks from previous windows, all of which are still available to download:
#1: Piney Gir – Everybody Knows It’s Christmas
#2: Lost Map Records: Gordon McIntyre – You and Me and The Ghosts of Christmas Past
#3: Hey You Guys! – I’m Sorry, Peter With Rosie – The Oxen + Peter Richard Adams – The Roaring Twenties
#4: Salt The Snail – Matador Print
#5: Dead Horse – Eating The Reindeer
#6: Blang Records: Sergeant Buzfuz – In The Bleak Midwinter, Paul Hawkins (Awkward Silences) – Christmas Doesn’t Love Me, Faux Fibbers – All The Nutters Come Out At Christmas
#7: The Scaramanga Six – Dog Form
#8: Hatcham Social – If You Go Down To The Woods Today (Three Cheers for Our Team)
#9: Alcopop! Records – Beach Riot – Modern Dinosaur, Frauds – Woke Life, Tokky Horror – Eden on Acid
#10: The Mining Co. – Last Stop for Tired Reindeer
#11: Sonic Tonic: Firestations – Long Year City, The Leaf Library – Tired Ghost, Shattercones – In The Bleak Midwinter, Maggie The Cat – The Cherry Tree Carol, Naomi In Blue – Colour of Blue
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