Students of Decay

An Anxious Host by Josh Mason

Since the early 2010s, Josh Mason has slowly amassed an enchanting discography, publishing recordings on labels such as Florabelle, Dauw, Longform Editions, and his retired Sunshine Ltd. imprint. Whether focusing on electric guitar or modular synthesizer, Mason approaches his music with intentionality, tenderness, and a keen ear for detail, resulting in an exceptional and enduring oeuvre. His workmanlike approach to craft and monomaniacal interest in circuit design culminated in 2021’s “Utility Music,” a daunting book/CD project that documents and unpacks a yearlong exploration of a Doepfer A-100 Eurorack system. The irony of such a project is that it might lead listeners to believe that academic technique and synthesis technology are the animating principles of his practice, but the reality is that this is only part of the story. Listening to Mason’s music, one gets the sense that, like a good novelist, he truly cares about his characters, which take the forms of the textures and timbres of archaic wavetable oscillators, idiosyncratic filters, pulverized samples, and exotic noise sources. “An Anxious Host” feels like a pivotal release in Mason’s catalog. It’s his first vinyl outing since 2019’s astounding “Coquina Dose,” and it may be the most succinct and potent album he’s made. The track titles function like stage directions in a play, intimating a hazy, filmic narrative populated by schemers, dreamers, and lost souls. As ever with Mason’s work, place is paramount, and this record is thoroughly shot through with the humidity, warmth, and “end of the line”-ness of the state of Florida. Seasick swells and sunken melodies; swampy, sputtering loops; sonic flotsam pooling together and flowing out, beckoning the listener to come have a soak.

Trust by Theodore Cale Schafer

The second album in a planned trilogy for Students of Decay, Theodore Cale Schafer’s “Trust” follows 2019’s “Patience,” building upon its motifs and compositional strategies to arrive at a potent document of artistic and personal growth. Recorded between 2020 and 2022, a period in which Schafer relocated to New York City, these arrangements feel like they bear the mark of a change in scale, not abandoning the private, diaristic sensibility of his earlier work so much as imbuing it with a charged atmosphere of vivid, slow-blooming intensity. These songs find the artist tightrope-walking between drama and austerity, narrative and abstraction. Such is the case on both “Luck,” in which a captivating wash of baroque strings slowly recedes into a bed of inky, flickering ambience, and “Best Friend,” wherein snatches of conversation are halted by entrancing piano motifs and hovering drones. This is an album that develops aspects of Schafer’s previous output– the patiently meted out, barely-there piano melodies, the unexpected resonance of off-the-cuff location recordings– working them like raw materials into robust, lyrical compositions. At times almost drifting into the romantic realm of the orchestral, “Trust” is the most generous and expansive offering we’ve heard from Schafer in his young career.

Kaivajaiset by Niko-Matti Ahti

Students of Decay presents "Kaivajaiset" by Finnish composer Niko-Matti Ahti. Best known for his work alongside his partner Marja as Ahti & Ahti, Niko-Matti has been an active participant in the Finnish underground since the late 1990s. "Kaivajaiset" is his first solo recording and was originally conceived of as an installation. Part horspiel, part musique concrete, it is a piece of music that draws comparisons to the work of pioneering avant-garde composers such as Henning Christiansen, Annea Lockwood, Luc Ferrari, and Pierre Mariétan. Ahti weaves vivid foley and domestic recordings together with oration and classical instrumentation (violin, clarinet, bass clarinet, and flute) to arrive at an expansive, narrative, and at times thrilling composition. “Kaivajaiset" was exhibited in two Finnish galleries: B-Galleria in Turku (2019) and 3H+K in Pori (2020). The installation drew inspiration from The Diggers' 1649 pamphlet and Michel Foucault's extension of Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of genealogy, and consisted of sounds, opinion pieces, a print copy of the pamphlet, and four cardboard collages. This record is a summary of the sounds of the installation.

Koko maailma by Olli Aarni

Since the late aughts, Helsinki-based multi-instrumentalist, linguist, and skateboarder Olli Aarni has released a steady stream of diverse and remarkably consistent recordings via labels such as Mappa, Longform Editions, Cotton Goods, Laaps, and Superpang. “Koko maailma” constitutes a major new work in his discography, finding a fertile middle ground between what might be understood as his two primary compositional modes: organic/chaotic/aleatoric music and rule-based, longform works of minimalism. The source material for these compositions was recorded exclusively using the Serge system at EMS Stockholm, but the timbres that Aarni arrives at do not recall archetypal Serge music as most know it. Meticulous editing and processing of the material with an array of digital tools has resulted in music that preserves the erratic and cybernetic character of the Serge system but sounds totally unique unto itself. The first piece, “Ylhäällä,” has the sonic character of fireflies at dusk or ants in the dirt — mercurial, hypnotic, flittering, and scattering tones presented in the spirit of the best environmental music. “Alhaalla” functions almost like a zoomed out impression of what precedes it, with just intonation tuning applied to sine wave generators to create grid-like, harmonically rich, and surprisingly emotive drone music. Micro and macro — two pieces of music, two perspectives of a world.

Singe by Angelo Harmsworth

"Singe" is the new record by Angelo Harmsworth, a musician who hails from the American Southwest and is operating now out of Berlin. Harmsworth’s work deals resolutely in extremes, but this music is not concerned with presenting binary or dichotomous relationships so much as it is with reconciling disparate sensibilities and sounds. Layers of meticulously edited and sculpted tones swirl around one another, creating kaleidoscopic patterns and hallucinated choral motifs that seem to thrive on amplitude or the position of the listener’s head. There is a visceral physicality to this music that aligns it with some of the core tenets of harsh noise, even while its tonal and timbral choices recall those of ambient music. This record follows excellent releases on enmossed/Psychic Liberation, Angoisse, Opal Tapes, and Harmsworth’s own Lime Lodge imprint and may be the high water mark of his published output thus far. There is drama and implied narrative in these seven compositions that seethes and hums as if reveling in a sort of violent gracefulness.

Speech Acts For A Dying World by Peter Gizzi

SPEECH ACTS FOR A DYING WORLD is a generous selection of Peter Gizzi’s acclaimed poetry of the last decade. There are new poems alongside poems from the collections, Now It’s Dark (2020), Archeophonics, (2016), In Defense of Nothing (2014), and Threshold Songs (2011). These poems strike a dynamic balance of honesty, emotion, intellectual depth, and otherworldly resonance—in Gizzi’s work, poetry itself becomes a primary ground of human experience. Haunted, vibrant, and saturated with luminous detail, Gizzi enlists the American vernacular in a magical and complex music. As Ben Lerner has written, “Gizzi is gathering from the air a live tradition.” These recordings were made in November of 2021 at Sonelab in Easthampton, MA. In these poems we discover a deep intimacy, where thinking and feeling, searching, cresting, turning, loving are all knotted and happening together.

LP edition distributed by blush

After the Bend by Flanger Magazine

After the Bend is the second album from Louisville based Flanger Magazine, and the follow up to FM’s 2018 debut, Breslin. Whereas Breslin was the solo creation of Christopher Bush, an album noted for “an astute synthesis of ‘library music’ and solo acoustic guitar,” and “a seamless blend into the uncluttered and airier side of classic 1970’s giallo,” After the Bend is an ensemble affair. An ecosystem, a perfect mutualism bodies forth—of strings, outdoor recordings, electronics, reeds, and percussion—featuring new FM players Anna Krippenstapel (Frekons (Freakwater + Mekons), The Other Years), Jim Marlowe (Equipment Pointed Ankh, Tropical Trash, Sapat), Eric Lanham and Benjamin Zoeller (both from Caboladies). The various combos perform with both a distinguished efficacy and unhurried Sunday drift—charged and beautiful, pulsating and pleasing. The production is subtle and tasteful. Mutating past the old saws of bounded individualism, a strange form of tentacular life accrues, cyborgian-fungral-tangles of the more-than-human variety. Robert Beatty’s cover art of otherworldly and interconnected river-scape gradients, coupled with song titles like “Reservoir,” “Falls Fountain Removed,” and “Sympathies for the River,” cue and clue the listener toward a river as a singular multitude analogue for the album. Interstitial gaps, clearings and openings give rise and merge into an accumulated flow from the tributaries of spirited improvisational performance, palimpsestic song cycles, and high fidelity studio production. The composite sound-image of After the Bend refuses to put both oars down into any one of the eddies of the folk, sound, chamber, electronic, or jazz idioms, and instead glides along the currents found within the slipstreams between. Gathering samples, a River Doctor Limnologist inspecting the properties of After the Bend might note the specter of Leroy Jenkin’s free-violin heat-light deepin the water’s thermal stratification. Or mortgage the late-Maestro’s time with Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza to pay down the growing river heat budget. Or take one’s dirty buckets to the banks of the 19th laundromat where Walt Dickerson plays his vibraphone parts from Divine Gemini with dowsing rods. Or excavate the bedrock in the drainage basin, noting skeletal remains of a Shostakovich string quartet attempting to tune up a Kentucky Fiddle’s subsequent influence on the chemical composition of the water. Or consult the historical revisionist reenactment troupe’s episode of Fishing with John (Fahey) in which Codona, The Sea Ensemble and Nuno Canavarro guest host as their fleet of paddle boats churn river water into a regal lager, and all the fish get drunk in their quest for the leaner enamel Hosianna Mantra GPS coordinates of the Fattened Herb. Bush and Marlowe recorded and produced the album at End of an Ear Studios, located in the Portland neighborhood, in the west end of the city of Louisville, bordering the Ohio River, between Kentucky’s Upper South and the Indiana’s Midwest, during the first year of the global pandemic, amidst the planet’s sixth great extinction event. As good a time to be alive as any other -Kris Abplanalp

hi leaves by soft tissue

“hi leaves” is the new full-length record from soft tissue, the duo of Glasgow-based artists Feronia Wennborg and Simon Weins. Following their self-titled debut for Penultimate Press in 2019, this collection examines microsound by way of extended amplification technique, bone conduction, domestic recordings, and digital feedback. Tracks like “plant pot” and “kettle” appear to disclose their source material, presenting wonderfully tactile environments of highly articulate sound. Wennborg and Weins prove themselves to be masterful arrangers of discrete, organic material, weaving together knotty and immersive compositions from these sharp, prickly sounds. Ultimately, soft tissue inhabits an intoxicating soundworld somewhere in between the patient abstractions of composerly eai music, the haptic indulgences of ASMR, and the diffuse digital pastorals of the 90’s a-musik/Cologne scene.

Still Lives by Marja Ahti

“Still Lives” is the third solo full length by the Finnish composer Marja Ahti, following a pair of releases on the Hallow Ground imprint. As a collection, it may be seen as a series of studies on the liminality of the listening act and an investigation into the physicality of sound. Ahti forges vivid electroacoustic environments from field recordings, analog synthesizers, acoustic feedback, magnetic tape and digital processing, resulting in a set of articulate, prickly, and surprising compositions. In the artist’s words, “These pieces could be conceived of as vanitas paintings of a kind – selections of mundane or archetypal objects, sounds that have their own distinct qualities, but exist only by virtue of being temporary events. From another angle, one could think of them as shrines – objects assembled and set in a particular relationship to each other, charging each other in their given constellations.” Marja Ahti (b. 1981) is a musician and composer based in Turku, Finland. Originally from Sweden, Ahti has been a part of the Finnish experimental music scene for more than ten years in different constellations. She is currently active in the duo Ahti & Ahti with her partner and as a member of the Himera artist/organizer collective.

Gyropedie by Andy Guthrie

“Gyropedie,” Andy Guthrie’s third record for Students of Decay, takes us further into their hermetic practice, wherein expertly captured field recordings, French horn, and electronics are woven into potent and richly imagined electroacoustic environments. In Guthrie’s own words, “Quite literally a record of pilgrimage from East to West. Remnants of Midwest and East Coast soundmarks, instruments sold to lighten the travel load, sketched out and then buried under the new. Winter birds and crunching snow, frozen playgrounds, broken synths - I spent a year decoupaging over this, but of course it's still there. A second moon appears occasionally in the daytime, and there are frequent, murky transmissions. California has something alien about it I'm still trying to grasp. Primarily vintage, unabashed, corny, I find myself becoming an impressionist.”

Mine Is The Heron by Tom James Scott

“Mine is the Heron” is the new Tom James Scott record, the first document of his solo work since 2017. Over the past decade, the UK-based composer has released a diverse body of recordings via labels such as Bo’Weavil, Carnivals, Where To Now?, and his own impeccably curated Skire imprint. This album finds Scott in half-remembered, sanguine moods, some of which are likely to remind listeners of his collaborative work with Andrew Chalk. Fragile acoustic piano runs are meted out with painterly finger strokes, buoyed by subtle, idiosyncratic FM sound design, chimes, and guitar. Culled from recordings composed and put to tape over the past several years, the collection has the feel of a poet's selected works, or perhaps more appropriately, a compendium of letters - exquisite vignettes that feel simultaneously private and important to disseminate into world. The hermetic nature of this quietly stunning music is evocative of abandoned shingle beaches and misty marshes, and of the Virginia Woolfe novel from which the album takes its title: “Mine is the heron that stretches its vast wings lazily; and the cow that creaks as it pushes one foot before another munching; and the wild, swooping swallow; and the faint red in the sky, and the green when the red fades; the silence and the bell; the call of the man fetching cart-horses from the fields - all are mine.”

Beside Myself by crys cole

"Beside Myself" is the second full-length release from Canadian sound artist crys cole. Known to many through her extensive collaborative practice with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Leif Elggren, and James Rushford, in her solo work cole uses contact microphones, voice, simple electronics, and field recordings to create sonic environments that linger uneasily at the threshold of perception. Demonstrating how cole's work has developed and deepened since the relative austerity of her first solo LP, "Sand/Layna," "Beside Myself" offers two lushly immersive side-long pieces that explore ideas of compositional drift. 'The Nonsuch' is inspired by the aural hallucinations experienced in the hypnagogic state during the onset of sleep. Opening with scratching contact mic textures and unintelligible vocal murmurs, the piece threads together live and studio performances with field recordings of urban environments to create a texture that is at once seemingly consistent and marked by constant transitions. Individual elements rise up from the background thrum only to disappear just as we become conscious of them; heterogenous sounds and spaces succeed one another with the unassailable logic of dreams. 'In Praise of Blandness (Chapter IX)' also focuses on drift and transition, but in a much more single-minded way. Over a rich, slowly-evolving organ drone, cole reads a passage from the French sinologist François Julien's book In Praise of Blandness (1991) exploring the concept of 'blandness' in the Taoist aesthetics of sound. Beginning crisp and clear, cole's voice becomes gradually less distinct over the course of the piece, the spoken words blurred by resonant frequencies à la Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room until we are left with only the rhythm of incomprehensible speech. The text that cole reads acts a perfect description of her aesthetic project: 'We hear it still, but just barely, and as it diminishes it makes all the more audible that soundless beyond into which it is about to extinguish itself. We are listening then, to its extinction, to its return to that great undifferentiated matrix'. -Francis Plagne, November, 2019

Patience by Theodore Cale Schafer

Patience is the debut full-length album by Santa Fe-based artist Theodore Cale Schafer. Alternately murky and narcoleptic and bristling with grit and light, this collection of eight pieces is a delicate play of contrasts. Impressionistic settings unfurl with an unhurried gait, opening with the dreamlike disorientation of “Gold Chain” in which a degraded location recording gives way to a soft web of treated piano motifs. Schafer’s compositions are sumptuous yet unfussy, recalling perhaps the concise, vignette-oriented tape works of Andrew Chalk, which seem to prioritize spontaneity and ephemerality over preciousness and decorum. This approach yields substantive results, as on “It's Late,” which marries a dolorous, clanging guitar sketch to the sound of change jostling in the pocket of a walker and the laughter of friends or passersby. This is diaristic music- rough-hewn, confessional, and teeming with possibility.

"LANDSCAPE DISSOLVES: Selected Films 2009-2016" is a collection of fourteen short films by Paul Clipson.

The collection includes: CHORUS (music by Gregg Kowalsky), LIGHT FROM THE MESA (music by Barn Owl), ABSTEIGEND (music by Evan Caminiti), LANDSCAPE DISSOLVES (music by Alex Cobb), ORIGIN (music by Che Chen), PULSARS E QUASARS (music by Arp), VOID REDUX (music by Barn Owl), BRIGHT MIRROR (music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma), LIGHT YEAR (music by Tashi Wada), DISPORTING WITH A SHADOW (music by Alex Cobb), THE LIQUID CASKET / WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS (music by Lawrence English), MADE OF AIR (music by Grouper), LIGHTHOUSE (music by King Midas Sound/Fennesz), and FEELER (music by Sarah Davachi).

Editors Note: "Paul and I worked on this project for a little over a year before his passing. Deciding on a grouping of works that would constitute a ‘Selected Films’ proved no easy feat. The titling, selection and sequencing of films, and the images used for the jacket and booklet have been presented exactly as Paul wanted. It has been an honor to put together and realize this collection, which I believe captures something of the breadth, dynamism, poetry, and rare beauty of Paul’s cinematic vision. This project would not be possible without the support of Yelena Soboleva and Anya Kamenskaya.” (Alex Cobb, February 2019)

A co-release with Re:Voir

Continental by Nicola Ratti

“Continental” is the new full length solo record by Milan-based multi-instrumentalist Nicola Ratti, following recent releases on Where to Now? and Room40. Conceived of by Ratti as a “series of big rooms or places to get lost in, full of small details and characterized each by a single flavor or perfume” it is a surprising and vibrant collection of music. Working with a palette of spare, expertly deployed percussive synthesis techniques, Ratti’s work here is both labyrinthine and concise. These eight tracks are able to evoke spaces real and imagined with startling efficiency and clarity. Sprawling old world libraries, cliff caves inhabited by dripping water and rock doves, an automaton nearly slipping its axis but recovering just in time and finding a new sense of purpose in the process. Includes download card. Edition of 300.

Daughters Of Time by Blue Chemise

Blue Chemise documents the hermetic soundworld of Australia’s Mark Gomes. “Daughters of Time” follows 2017’s brilliant full-length “Influence on Dusk,” released in micro-edition on Gomes’ own Greedy Ventilator imprint. It is an elegiac set of vignettes recorded straight to dictaphone with minimal post-production. For me these pieces function in a manner akin to Loren Connor’s evocative “airs,” conjuring poignant, intangible senses of longing and nostalgia then disappearing well before overstaying their welcome. Regarding their genesis, Gomes points to a quote from Australian artist Robert Hunter: "It's like I'm external to them. They develop their own assertion and character; their becoming finished is a thing they decide themselves. It's unexplainable." Includes download card. Edition of 300.

Brass Orchids by Andy Guthrie

Snapshots of an abandoned city. Fragments of song drifting out of basements and across alleyways, muffled conversations. Scrutinized, the "music" disappears -- maybe paracusia? Brass Orchids, Anne Guthrie's second full-length album for Students of Decay, is an entrancing collage of new and old sounds drawn from a variety of beguiling sources. Posthumous contributions from the artist's grandfather, a jazz pianist; obsolete media palimpsests (some vanity, some necessity); tap dancing on a peeling floor... An unsettling and strangely beautiful album -- akin to something on the tip of your tongue, which, before you can name it, slips away into forgetting. Includes download code. Edition of 300.