The sun is out, feels like a good day to catch up with Chris Irregardless, it is a catch up rather overdue. The sun is properly out for maybe the first time this year, the plum tree outside has gone from white to green in a mater of minutes, nothing glamerous, just a handful of plum stones from Haggerson Park’s trees thrown in the corner a few years ago and it is the perfect moment to listen to this latest Chris Irregardles recording; “the title track is a glitched guitar track over darkening bird sounds that falls apart rapidly. This track was so evil, it destroyed its own masters and crashed Audacity when I first tried to import the 320 mp3 that was the only working copy of the track left. Eeek”.
Evil? Well the result isn’t, it feels positive, I hope these aren’t The Last Nature Sounds You Will Ever Hear and are those birds part of the recording or are they sitting outside the bunker here in Hackney? There certainly a lot of bird-like sound in this rather fine piece…
“Chris Irregardless is an ambient musician from the United States. Known for their experimental soundscapes, their music often blends atmospheric tones with rhythmic patterns, creating immersive auditory experiences and showcasing their talent for sparse yet compelling instrumentals”
And there is this album, if it is an album? An album that, to these ears sound like a real invitation; “A bunch of sounds that I can’t stop using in my music, maybe you can get some use out of them, too…” find our more via Bandcamp where there’s lot of Chris Irregardless creativity, sound art, sound paintings maybe?
Sound paintings maybe? Well almost certainly, these pieces do sound like they should be listened to in an art gallery in the same way as you’d quietly reverentially have a conversation with a painting or two. Here’s a painting of “a quiet guitar drone with some “violin” scrapings that falls to Earth at the end…”
And here’s two more…
Silver Gradient’s Day Off apparently “started with thirty seconds of pink noise and a pure sine wave. Somehow, it turned into two minutes of “violin” sounds with a throbbing bass line underneath it all. The Bus Takes The Sky has a stuttering melody that decays and regenerates itself as it goes on”
– I do like the less is more of these pieces, the consideration of the space they exist in, the use of quiet alongsice the intriguing strength of the delicate layers. I do like the consideration here, these pieces haven’t just been thrown togethet in the manner that so many things that are kind of like this are…
There’s a lot more to explore on the Chris Irregardless Bandcamp page
Meanwhile….
Pas Musique and another part, a fifth part of that film in eight parts that the New York experimental art and music collective Pas Musique have been making. This time shoes and the fifth film of a “series of 8 Phrases”. That link you just passed will tell you lots more and take you to the previous installments or phrases…
And while we’re here dancing around more architecture and wondering if that’s a crow that’s outside or maybe came along with these recordings from Berlin?
Hey Driver Cool Down the Horses and maybe a couple of New Methods of Knowledge Production? A new album from the Berlin collective who say they do it all live, all improvised, that there’s no computer, no overdubs – “Hey Driver Cool Down the Horses are a free company of improvisers, bricoleurs, fragment oracles and feedback mystics. No silence is too empty. No sound is born whole. All meaning is assembled. One-take improvisations by Sebastian Bissinger, Jens Nordmann, Ian Warner, and Michael Wolf”.
“Each track should be considered as a heuristic for the sampling of possible futures rather than as a procedure for preserving past signals. Go bravely dear traveller, unburdened by former pursuits! Accept this dilapidated koan, and send us a postcard from the epistemic rupture” and oh, hang on, I’m wasting my time, there’s nothing to share yet, this is a 36 minute album of sound that sounds collagaed even though they say it isn’t, sn alnum of who knows what that’s out in April, there’s nothing that you can hear right now. We can tell you the new album involved “a sack full of minidiscs. A box of CD-Rs. Days of recording sessions, carefully dated: Berlin, early 2000s. A snapshot of an era in the form of anarchic musical improvisation, in kitchens, living rooms, vacant office spaces. A mountain of instruments, effect pedals, cables, circuit-bent junk, and, barely in command of them, a quartet calling themselves Hey Driver Cool Down The Horses. A handful of gigs followed, in a club, an abandoned factory, the foyer of a public library, a former fire station. Then silence. The recordings languish for years, but now their time has come. Five albums are out, and the sixth, called New Methods of Knowledge Production will arrive on the 15th April 2026 as limited and numbered CD plus digital release”.
I guess all you can do at the moment is go explore the Hey Driver back catalogue. They sent in the new album today, it would have fitted perfectly on this page, it is rather good in a rather nailed together kind of way. Maybe not quite New Methods of Knowledge Production, certainly slightly different rather rewarding methods. Their previous album, hey, it only came out in January of this year, something called User Experience is something that is very much along the same deconstructed put back together lines as the album due out in April and the beautiful thing is you don’t need our review, just a recomendation, a sign post, a link. Here, here’s the album Hey Driver Cool Down The Horses released in January, and here’s their Bandcamp page…
And here, while we’re here, here’s a reposting of a #43SecondFilm of Rattle from last year and here’s some words that went with the film at the time – ORGAN THING: Breathtaking songs from Quinie, while Rattle are reaching back down a thousand generations to something primal. Day one of Upset The Rhythm’s birthday party at London’s Cafe Oto…
THE ORGAN 