Darren Copeland & Company - Living It Out In The Dead Air-Space -1988- (Cassette, John Doe Recordings), Canada

Living It Out In The Dead Air-Space was the magnum opus cassette album release by the Ontario based composer, sound-artist and electronic music producer Darren Copeland. The music was realized over the course of half a year during 1987 and 1988 together with a larger group of Canadian experimental musicians: Ron McFarlan (also to be found on the blog under his project Dust That Collects), David Edwards, John Marriott, Michel Flock and Lhuke Shier. 

The pieces create a conceptually hollistic space that consists of dark ambient electronic soundscapes, spoken word, field-recordings and ethno-tribal influences. It carries different properties that on the one hand seem to carefully invoke the void of space (a dead end space) with its dark and silent chaos of endless probabilities and on the other hand it displays human consciousness and rational forms of understanding that are defying the dead end space from an existential point of view. The sounds of the dark untamable and alienating universe have an eternal presence in the natural and urban environment on earth. Alienation and the presence of the unknown are of great influence on life existence.

Living It Out In The Dead Air-Space is another beautiful work of Canadian experimental music that is perfect for a deeper listening experience. Simultaneously it works well as an invocation for different existentialist questions on a scientific, natural or spiritual level.

Through the further development of technology in later decades sound explorations from scientific standpoints have obviously become endless and have elaborated into many realms. Yet on this recording we can experience the scientific exploration as a subject of the music rather than that scientific approaches are being used to create the music.

Considering the year of the release, ofcourse Mr. 'Star Wars-program' and buffoon-president Ronnie Raygun is depicted on the cassette cover, but I suppose we could all think of other people suitable for the cover in today's world.

Kindly donated by The Y Create Archive

Get it HERE

Dust That Collects - Black Water Delirium -1991- (Tape, Self-Released), Canada

Dust That Collects was an explorative electronic sound project by Canadian artist Ron McFarlan. McFarlan had been involved in the home-taping culture of the 80's and started his project Dust That Collects around 1990 when opening for Illusion of Safety at the Music Gallery in Toronto. A brief autobiographical summary of McFarlan's musical history can be found over at Don Campau's Living Archive.

Black Water Delirium is a nice cassette bringing together four pieces of post-industrial soundscapes of noise, mechanical sound manipulation, field recordings and drone. You can hear almost ambient psycho-acoustic atmospheres that are indeed somewhat reminiscent of Illusion of Safety, or maybe even something of the Hafler Trio, Empirical Sleeping Consort or Zoviet France (many examples obviously exist). The last 22-minute track Black Water Delirium is a nice highlight where some sort of tenniscourt sounds are being manipulated into dark aquatic and swirling depths that ultimately culminate into their own sonic deconstruction.

The sound fidelity and certain parts of the tape are still very much rooted in the cassette medium and culture. Later this type of dark ambient soundscape music transitioned almost in its entirety to CD and became very inherently clean in production, even if the music was noise. This was the first self-released cassette by Dust That Collects, maybe some other tapes will surface with the time.

Get it HERE


PS:
We still have major issues with Zippyshare as an external file-hosting server since it is being blocked in many different countries. You can bypass it by using proxy servers though, which is what you should do. But still, where are we migrating to with the files? Any suggestions?