Genre

Format

Date

Slip

Contemporary composition crossed with experimental song and improvisation from 2012 onwards. Based out of Newcastle & Berlin. 


"'Pleasure Island' is British composer Tim Parkinson’s disquieting and joyous Slip debut: play time in end times. Titled after the Disney adaptation of ‘Paese dei balocchi’ (or the Land of Toys) in Carlo Collodi’s ‘The Adventures of Pinocchio’ (1883), 'Pleasure Island' is a metaphysical playground of organic and digital cohabitation, its inhabitants pacified by toys and comforts. Alongside Dawn Bothwell, Suze Whaites, Laurie Tompkins, and Francesca Fargion, Parkinson exerts an uncannily emotional pull from an unlikely but potent alliance of ultra-minimal aesthetics, dead-beat drums, junk electronics, and mechanised mantras. Voices are hemmed in by electronic sound. People buffeted around by machines. Words surrounded by garlands of digital interference. Time repackaged as countdown. Tim’s trash-opera ‘Time With People’ continues to be performed around the world, past champions of which include Object Collection, a.pe.ri.od.ic, Edges, and NEC, and he is a co-curator of London’s longstanding ‘Music We’d Like To Hear’ series. Despite decades of fiercely independent production, this is his only piece conceived of first and foremost as an album. --- Tim Parkinson / keyboards, stylophones, drums, percussion, midi, electronics, sounds, vocals Francesca Fargion / vocals on 'Happy Birthday' Dawn Bothwell / vocals Laurie Tompkins / vocals Suze Whaites / vocals --- Recorded in London Oct–Dec 2017 & Newcastle May 2018. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Artwork by Rick Pushinsky.

Tim Parkinson – Pleasure Island

"'Lost In Shadows' is American composer/performer Ashley Paul's bewitching Slip debut: an expansive, deeply personal excavation of recent motherhood, told through songs dissolving and re-crystallising at the threshold of free improvisation. At the LP's heart is Paul's mercurial multi-instrumental style, which renders the primal wails, clunks, and twangs of clarinet, saxophone, percussion, and guitar uncannily melodic, alchemised by frank, vulnerable vocals. The deft negotiation of the fragile and the coruscating evidenced on Paul's ‘Line The Clouds’ (2013) and ‘Heat Source’ (2014) has now reached a kind of hesitant sublime. Recorded over 3 weeks at a FUGA residency in Zaragoza, Spain in December 2016, 'Lost In Shadows' documents a cathartic outpouring; the first time Paul had been able to write since the birth of her daughter 11 months earlier. The record is completely influenced by "many hours spent awake at night in a dream like state of half consciousness, darkness and solitude; an overwhelming feeling of loneliness and exhaustion made light by a profound new love", with Paul's solo playing bolstered by additional baritone saxophone, cello, tuba, and percussion. This ensemble set-up, which premiered much of this work at 2017's Counterflows festival, gives the LP a fresh sense of luxuriousness, bounce, and rich possibility.'" — Artwork by Gayle Paul. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.

Ashley Paul – Lost in Shadows

'Ample Profanity' is composer Laurie Tompkins and cellist Oliver Coates' collaborative debut: coagulated gristle surfacing from a Beal, Brooklyn-brown, Ray V, Bangs, GAN, Rugs and Works acid bath. The EP collects 5 pieces composed by Laurie and then co-edited and performed with Olly. The former plays keys, tape player, and samples, the latter cello with effects. Both sing. Here is grazed, contorted classicism, here post-binge hallucinations, here gunky funk. "I met [Laurie] when I was 16, at school. I don’t know where along the way he’s found that he can make a piece out of flower pots and shouting, and it can be genuinely moving. With Laurie, there’s this thing with Netflix culture and tropes in the promotion of electronic dance music. Like, “you must all listen to footwork now” because they market that at you. Ample Profanity is all about awkward juxtapositions: bits of music from House Of Cards coupled with RP Boo. That’s the headspace he’s in and he’s trying to articulate these as cello rhythms. I find that really satisfying. It looks really spidery and architectural on the page. You’ve got to repeat it 17 times and then shout the next thing, so it’s absurdly difficult to play. To play it physically, the energy of playing it, that’s why I do it." - Oliver Coates, The Wire, September 2018. --- Laurie Tompkins / vocals, keys, tape player, samples Oliver Coates / vocals, cello, effects --- Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Artwork by Laurie Tompkins and Suze Whaites.

Laurie & Olly – Ample Profanity

'Ray' is Ashley Paul's bright, sensual return to Slip: a lifting, delighting suite of yearning winds, loose beats, and cocooning, humid bass coming together and falling apart as songs. The LP airs Paul's new trio, alongside bass clarinettist Yoni Silver and bassist Otto Willberg, who fatten out and shine light on her singularly intimate, multi-instrumental with mystery and grace. 2018's 'Lost In Shadows' wrote into the bewildering ecstasy of recent motherhood with a tingling resolve. On 'Ray' - recorded remotely during lockdown - Paul's deliciously hesitant songcraft is an outpouring and an anchor in freshly tumultuous times. Says Ashley: Over the past six months I've found myself needing music in a new way, a way of coping. I found again albums I had loved in the past, full of melody and humour, to cancel out the barrage of terrible news happening outside. I think this album is a reflection of that need. There is the playfulness of spending my days with our four year old, and the hours spent tending to plants in the garden and examining bugs, and also the pain of missing family and friends. It’s hard for me to fully comprehend the breadth of emotion I've felt recently but maybe this is a small window. The trio idea had been formulating in my head for months, and then lockdown happened. At first I was very disappointed and thought I'd be waiting forever to finally make it a reality, but time passed. I started working on a new album and could only hear it with these guys. We recorded remotely. I sent material in a variety of ways; written, aurally and verbal ideas/queues, sometimes with just a shell of a track and other times nearly completed. I wanted all our voices to be present, and to allow freedom in the parts for interpretation and improvisation. Maybe because we've all worked together in various situations and are friends, I’m not sure, but it came together naturally, magically and quickly. --- Ashley Paul - voice, alto saxophone, clarinet, guitar, percussion Yoni Silver - bass clarinet Otto Willberg - double bass Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi Painting by Gayle Paul Design by Ashley Paul --- Slip Records, 2020

Ashley Paul – Ray

Ralph Cumbers makes a very welcome return to Slip with the sweet drive and unguarded lyricism of 'Orezero': a smiling-through-the tears chaser to 2019's majestic '111 angelic MIDI cascade'. Says Clef: "'Orezero' is both the prequel and sequel to '111 Angelic MIDI Casacde' in that I'm not sure which ones is Wonderland and which one is through the Looking Glass. So it can stay unresolved as both and neither? Feels like a strange time to be releasing what might be the most joyous Bass Clef record. Certainly 'One Tree Island' and 'Heavy Lifting Light Wave' are two cuts of happiness, but the kind of happiness that acknowledges and incorporates all the unhappiness that came along the way. Other tracks are a more rarefied kind of joy I guess, I find myself stripping back layers on these tracks to an extent I never would have dreamed was possible for me. These tracks were recorded in 2019 over quite some time, although each track itself takes no more than 3-4 hours and are recorded live. Editing clears the clutter to reveal the intent, not always obvious at the time of recording. I was pushing myself, again, to focus on harmony, and melody, the two things I think I am worst at, rather than returning to rhythm and texture, the playgrounds I always felt most comfortable in. Instrument restrictions helped as always – most of the sounds heard are from two ROMplers, much-loathed relics of pre-computer music, loaded with largely un-tweakable samples of acoustic instruments, samples you have heard on a billion records, but hopefully stacked in new combinations this time around. Backed up with Microkorg, a resolutely and extremely popular, yet deeply uncool, digital synthesizer. The tracks here were originally intended for two different records (maybe that’s why the prequel/sequel feeling persists) but thanks to excellent old school A&R in the form of an evolving conversation with Laurie from Slip, together we eventually uncovered one record that I think manages to weave all these threads together. I hope it will bring some smiles to some people." 'Orezero' [SLP059] is available from October 2020 on cassette and/or download. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.

Bass Clef – Orezero

"The Godfather of Wild Pop." "'Trouble Number' is a major retrospective of four decades of peerless, visionary, and feral production from Gwilly Edmondez - the dad from Yeah You. This 90 minute package cherry picks from hundreds upon hundreds of hours of psychoanalysis through pop waste, performed by Gwilly upon himself since the founding of his '80s outfit Radioactive Sparrow. Bewildering and basically incomparable in its entirety, 'Trouble Number' mongrelises strains of hip-hop, black metal, folk, power balladry, more more more, with a properly prophetic, popwise soul. Pay your respects." Says Gwilly: Gwilly Edmondez just grew as a character project in the mid-1980s, offshoot from the to’l-spon/non-com/pop-kak invention-pool that was/is Radioactive Sparrow, itself founded by a group of Bridgend (13-year-old/non-voter) elements in 1980. Gwilly is a solo/collaborative improvisation that started out making fake, unwritten rock, then progressed in the 1990s to real unaccompanied rock, before settling into a mode of practice defined by sampling, tapes and vocals. Over many years, Gwilly has struck up many material partnerships and misadventurist associations of, with the likes of James Joys, Val Persona, Faye MacCalman, Karl D’Silva, Tobias Illingworth, Laura Late-Girl, b-cátt, Odie Ji Ghast, THF Drenching, Tony Gage, Richard Bowers, People Like Us... But in the end none more so than Elvin Brandhi. ‘Gnarlage of Self’, the C30 album, was made on Newcastle’s hottest day in 2017, in an upstairs room in Heaton, recorded by Dario Lozano Thornton with Schoeps MK2/MK8 pair to Sonodore preamps in one take subsequently edited and disorganized by Dario. ‘Gwilly Edmondez: A Retrospective Mixtape Made Questionably & Unquestioningly by Himself’ started out as a kind of slapstick/slapdash best of... but quickly became its own entanglement of old stuff, new-but-unused stuff made for the C30, and bits of recent live sets. The first half, side one, tries to bungle blindly into the nature of supplication, confession and self-condemning introspection – find the self then kill it; side two starts on the other side of death inhaling wafts of cheap air freshener as a means to hallucinate a personal history that never could’ve happened anyway, before scrambling back through the rear end of personality only to be consigned to liturgical palliatives in a manner carried out by his countless forebears of the cloth. It could only end with “Walken’s Kiss”, a sardonically pronounced cliffhanger. --- Music & Artwork by Gwilly Edmondez. Mix and Edits by Dario Lozano Thornton and Gwilly Edmondez.

Gwilly Edmondez – Trouble Number