Calineczka / What Is Music And What Should It Be

As abstract paintings on white gallery walls are nudged from abstraction into another weave of discourse by the presence of a title, so too the worldess drone is rendered a new agency in the bestowal of a name. Here Calineczka (the Spanish based artist and label owner, Michal Stanczyk), plainly puts an otherwise polite and rather humble (in all but duration) drone into a position of opposition and provocation which ultimately helps the mental effect of listening and anticpation of listening. Over two 40 plus-minute sides of refrigerated hum and microbial progression, this cassette release affects a pleasing, arms-folded defiance of inaction and then repeats the feat on side B which is literally the piece played in reverse. It all fascinates in its non effect. As a lure to listening of the deep well variety, it is extremely effective in provoking the best kind of long drone thoughts: "Is this happening on the tape or in my head?"

  

Caroline McKenzie / Citizen Of Nowhere

The non-auratic elements of this piece by the sound artist Caroline McKenzie (aka Beth Gripps) are its title, which refers to a notoriously callous statement made by the British Prime Minister Theresa May, and its alternative title 'More Music For Drowning'. It is interesting the damp shadow this casts on what might ordinarily drift along in that most bourgeois and comforting of forms: the ambient mist. As ambient mists goes, this is a fine and vital example. Separated tiers of shifting gauze ripple in a pleasing co-dependance with tiny grains of static. The whole is artfully controlled with more subtraction and absence than presence. For the still and attentive listener, there is a sad drama in the flagging cadence that emerges, a bobbing figure at mid-distance, mouth and ears at the water line.