12 track album

Music and instruments by Robert Dallas Gray, Martin John Henry. Synths by Craig Mulholland. Bass by Dougie Payne. Recorded at home by Whin, Craig Mulholland, Dougie Payne. Digital Booklet with artwork by LADYfingers, stills from Kris Boyle's video, and new writing by Kate Kiernan. Video by Kris Boyle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qavK3WqMQ0U Mixes by LADYfingers, Jewel Scheme, Isobel McKenna, diss1 Kris Boyle: https://www.krisboyle.co.uk Jewel Scheme: https://jewelscheme.bandcamp.com Isobel McKenna: https://vivariumsounds.bandcamp.com diss1: https://diss1.bandcamp.com

11 track album

This episode of the podcast, I meet musician FC Stoffel of Die Leere Im Kern Deiner Hoffnung from Cologne.

Listening Party from Kiffie.

Release Date: 05/11/2026 Catalogue no.: NS12

The origins of my music lay in finger picking North American folk music and Afro American blues which I began playing in the late 1950's. I pursued this and then songwriting into the early 70's when I then discovered Hawaiian music and the world of American free jazz and European free improvised music which altered my perception of the guitar totally, especially as a solo instrument. Apart from the first few formative years of learning guitar standard European tuning never became a part of my technique. I immersed myself in 'open tunings' once I realised their global significance. A new tuning inevitably produces new music. From the mid 70's I almost exclusively played lap steel guitar - fretting the instrument with a steel bar and as fingers on frets became redundant another world of instruments that involved sliding something ( almost anything) up and down strings to produce glorious glissando appeared. Hawaiian, African, Greek, Thai, Chinese, Indian, Korean, Vietnamese and many other of the worlds music has instruments that involves this technique and all of them have to some extent influenced the music you hear here. For almost all my musical life I have played a 1930's metal bodied National Tri-Plate resonator guitar, an instrument designed by Slovakian American John Dopyera, initially for Hawaiian musicians as a lap steel instrument. Recently I wanted to have an instrument to travel with on holidays and longer trips that was small, light and 'cabin-able' on aircraft (although I always carry my instruments on board whenever possible) and I purchased a wooden bodied Yamaha short scale travel guitar, the first wooden bodied guitar I have owned since the very first instrument I ever had. The experience of a new instrument (like a new tuning) always seems to uncover new music, waiting to be discovered, hidden within. This small travel instrument also seemed to invite a return to playing with fingers on frets as well a steel or bottleneck, although I wasn't about to revisit nostalgic musical territory with it. I am an improvisor and although there are 'songs' here they are all musically improvised with only the text having some pre-formed essence, and they are produced using a William Burroughs/Brion Gyson cut-up technique on a couple of Thomas Pynchon novels, which has produced a body of work of about 35 'songs' that I call Spirit Songs. Every performance of Spirit Songs is different. In the winter of 2016 I took the new instrument and some songs out for a short european tour and in Switzerland, at Cave12 in Geneva, I was fortunate enough to have Eleonora Puzzle as my sound person who recorded my set. I thank her and Sixto and all who attended that night and made the recording and music possible. What you hear is what they heard that night in its entirety apart from the first five minutes or so while I was warming up which I have saved for another occasion. mike cooper / rome august 2016

For three decades Oren Ambarchi — prolific solo artist, consummate collaborator, founder of the esteemed Black Truffle — has been one of experimental music's most restlessly inventive figures. His records tend to reach outward, layering sounds, collaborators and ideas into complex shifting architectures. Prophetic Perfect Tense goes the other way entirely. Solo guitar, two sides, two single takes, minimal effects, tracked to a Telefunken 24-track machine at Studio Dede in Tokyo and produced by Randall Dunn. By his own account, the most conventionally guitar-sounding record he has ever made. Ambarchi's discography is in large part a record of who he has played with: Jim O'Rourke and Keiji Haino, Fennesz, John Zorn, Merzbow, crys cole, and Sunn O))), where he and Dunn first worked together on Monoliths & Dimensions (2009), the record Dunn produced that remains a high-water mark for both of them. The brief Ambarchi set was restraint. "I was determined to do something understated and single-minded," he says, "almost like a straight-up 'solo guitar' record without layers of effects and overdubs." The models were João Gilberto's 1973 white album and Alemu Aga's hushed 1995 bägänna recordings. Records that get their whole atmosphere from a player, a room, and almost nothing else. What landed on tape is stranger and warmer. The music settles early into a loose, circling figure and stays with it, closer to blues than anything else in his catalog, "an abstracted John Lee Hooker-on-a-broken-Fender-Rhodes shuffle," as Ambarchi puts it. Detours like this are close to a working method for him: "I thrive on these in-the-moment surprises. In fact, I almost rely on them." Dunn set up a Leslie cabinet, a Fender Twin and an Ampeg B-15 running to tape before Ambarchi sat down, and the space is audible on the record: three-dimensional, close, unmistakably a place. "I felt comfortable not having to do too much as the sound in the space was so rich." The opening is still guarded; then, "aiming for the theta state," his playing loosens and the rest unspools without visible effort. Everything incidental was left where it fell: amp hum, fret squeaks, Leslie pedal clicks, strings scraping the table. The record's only construction is a single guitar overdub, mid-Side A and at the start and end of Side B, which Dunn talked him into after Ambarchi had called the session finished. The result is Ambarchi about as exposed as he has ever been on record: one player, a very live room, a figure followed until it ran out. The prophetic perfect is the tense for a thing not yet done but spoken of as already finished — fitting for a record made by someone who knew exactly what he was going to do, right up until he did something else.

Not long ago, Maia Sinaiko had a nightmare that morphed into an epiphany. While they slept, Sinaiko imagined that the world was ending, that the Earth itself was about to be swallowed by a black hole. From their perch in an old bedroom in a long-ago apartment, Sinaiko saw that physics itself was rupturing—water ran in reverse, doors locked and unlocked without a touch, traffic lights hung upside down. All traces of human civilization would soon be obliterated, our collective efforts lost forever; no one would ever know, Sinaiko realized in their nocturnal terror, about the films their sister had made. Sinaiko cried to their father, who responded to this looming end-of-everything scenario with an unexpected bit of sanguine wisdom: “But it could be amazing.” This is the premise of the opening title track of Sigil, the second album by Sour Widows, the Bay Area band Sinaiko started nearly a decade ago now with fellow songwriter, singer, and guitarist Susanna Thomson. Actually, that feeling of hope slithering from dark corners permeates most every track of Sigil, an album named for a dream that Thomson had about making a record called “Sigil” and that navigates the wasteland of human cruelty and loss only to emerge with defiant and hard-won hope. Awful things happen during Sigil. A genocide leaves bodies rotting in the sun. Lovers subjugate their counterparts with empty promises, emotional cruelty, and physical dominance. Parents are lost, leaving behind chasms that only seem to grow. But these conflicts and crises alternately produce righteous rage, welcome solidarity, and revelatory freedom. Sigil sounds like a musical breakthrough for Sour Widows, and its songs about persevering and growing feel like personal breakthroughs, too. An end is always nearby here. What comes after can always be amazing. Since Sinaiko and Thomson made their debut, Revival of a Friend, with drummer Max Edelman and bassist Timmy Stabler in 2024, the band has been out of the Bay a lot, from opening for Alex G across Europe to headlining in the Midwest during a sweltering summer. They’ve had several realizations on the road. First, standing onstage every night and filling open air with sound is actual magic, an act of real-time creation that feels nothing short of alchemy. Second, as Sinaiko and Thomson both crossed the threshold of 30, the childhood friends and current roommates accepted anew that this is their life, that the expected domestic niceties of home ownership or stable relationships or raising children must continue to yield to the exigencies of this art they make together. And, finally, after playing the six- and eight-minute tangles that framed so much of Revival of a Friend each day, they understood that there were other exciting ways to approach their craft. Maybe they could write simpler songs, using classic “cowboy chords” and built on refrains that could be shouted out by a crowd. Maybe that might even leave more room for studio experimentation? Sour Widows push all of this to the fore on Sigil, an album informed by the magic of mere existence and the possibility of the unknown, from sound to substance. For the first time, the band headed south to record, convening with acclaimed producer and Jay Som mastermind Melina Duterte at Seahorse Studios in downtown Los Angeles. Organ roars at the climax of the tender and defiant “Her Garden,” while electronics screech through the twists and turnarounds of the arcing and aspiring “Lucky Star.” Cello howls behind opener “Sigil,” and violin moans beneath acoustic closer “Wounds of Purification.” These are new choices and textures for Sour Widows. The songs themselves are the most magnetic Sour Widows have ever written, too, like the hook of self-liberation Thomson offers during “Her Garden” or the chorus of self-actualization that Sinaiko nails during “Lucky Star.” Lumbering with doom guitars and marching drums, “Choke Chain” rides the line between the violence and gentleness of sex, its soft harmonies and snarling sound perfectly capturing this fundamental conflict. These 11 numbers curve in unexpected directions, but there is a newfound immediacy to Sigil, as if Sour Widows have urgent findings to share. They do: Thomson’s mom was a clairvoyant, and Sinaiko grew up in a home of artists and performers, people able to conjure worlds out of nothing but sheer imagination. In recent years, the two have grown more interested in the power of what we cannot perceive, understand, or explain—black holes, past lives, the endlessness of energy. These phenomena point to the ways that what we perceive as an endpoint is possibly just a new beginning, a chance to reorder and reorient what we think that we know. Throughout Sigil, ostensible disaster ushers in a new start. Written by Thomson for Babehoven’s Maya Bon, “Blood in the Grass,” for instance, is a gorgeous and aching ode to friendship, to the way that two people who have endured so much loss can hold one another up and push one another along. If its acoustic guitars sound delicate at the beginning, the radiant electric tones and dovetailing harmonies sound like armor by the end. Written by Sinaiko, who is Jewish and of Assyrian descent, “Lullaby” presents a harrowing portrait of genocide in Palestine. It slowly morphs into a screed of retribution, though, with Sinaiko speaking, singing, and screaming their hopes for comeuppance in the song’s second half. When Sinaiko played “Lullaby” for Thomson, it inspired her to write its chaser and the album’s graceful closer, “Wounds of Purification.” “Reverse create/every possible life,” Thomson sings. “Until you’re holding me/in the well of light.” Like almost all of Sigil, it is a prayer for what could still be, presented against the pain of the present. Sour Widows was born out of and also into hard times. Around the time the band began, Thomson’s mother had just been diagnosed with cancer, to which she succumbed just after the release of the band’s second EP. In the years since, partners have been lost, other parents have gotten sick, and the Bay they have long loved as home has been subject to a kind of techno-fascist gentrification in total opposition to the values of Sour Widows and their wider community. An action as much as an album, Sigil feels like a rejoinder to all that, pushing against horrors and saying it doesn’t have to be this way, that there is so much unknown left to explore and indulge in this life—and probably the next one, too.