Navel-Gazers #64 is an interview with Francisco López who is going to talk to us about HIMAVANTA . I’m sure that this is the most preparation I’ve ever done for an interview, as we’re going to be discussing a work which is nearly 11 hours long. These recordings, which are all from rainforests in various parts of Thailand, have certainly gotten under my skin over the last few days, as one can imagine. In terms of formulating the right questions it’s an essay of Francisco’s called Sonic Creatures which he mentioned to me - accessible on his website - that’s guiding me in the right direction, towards a line of thinking which is non-intuitive but most illuminating. You may know of a thought experiment where if you repeat a word enough times over, it may seem to lose its usual associations… that’s a peculiar consequence of extended listening, and after 11 hours of ‘HIMAVANTA’ I’m in a similar frame of mind. There’s a rational awareness of course, that these sounds are tethered...

Navel-Gazers #63 is an interview with Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson and Andy Heck-Boyd who are going to talk to us about Ideas On Tape . Easily my favourite release of 2022, I recall what first caught my attention, it was that title: it seemed to denote something fundamentally vague, non-committal, perhaps unfinished even, and yet - to my ears - simultaneously mythic somehow, or conceivably so and that’s how I’ve come to regard it. If you’ve not heard ‘Ideas On Tape’, prepare to be pleasantly bewildered as its creators conjure 39 minutes of material in a format which drifts between real- and deeply unreal-time, each taking turns muttering into the microphone in ways which are remarkably consistent in terms of a certain offhanded tone of delivery from the two artists but which vary in all other observable aspects. The vocal passages here range from found text to self-referential narratives to totally wordless ghostly wailing. Playback timbre and speed fluctuate wildly. And am...

Navel-Gazers #62 is an interview with Tatyana Waldron a.k.a. Cosmeana who is going to talk to us about Swamp Lantern . This is an album which managed to come along just at a point when I was looking for something new and different. What got my attention - as is so often the case - was a cover image, in this case an artwork of Tatyana’s. It depicts a pair of outlandish figures, painted in cold, iridescent colours of a shade I’d wager anyone rarely encounters outside of the subconscious, mired in what one assumes is the titular swamp. And the music in turn seems to transport us to that very place. In fact an album like ‘Swamp Lantern’ causes me to stop and reflect on the wonder of sound-making: how is it that an artist using only the production, placement and presentation of sound can seem to conjure something so similar to tangible, observable space in the ears of the listener? Knee deep into track 3, Unrecognised flowers it’s as though I’m right there in the marsh with th...

Navel-Gazers #61 is an interview with Daryl Worthington a.k.a. Beachers who is going to talk to us about There are no cicadas in this town . I’ve been lucky enough to obtain access to this music prior to its release - I have to say the effect is rather ominous, almost like glimpsing into some previously-thought-to-be-indeterminate future, maybe one pervaded by ketchupy red smog of the kind depicted on this album’s cover. The soundscape of its first track, where Daryl has recorded the mechanical malfunction of a bus careening around London’s Zone 2 (or who knows, maybe Zone 3), is familiar enough to me, but it’s not long before the plot thickens. With Daryl’s music what always intrigues me is a jarring sort of interplay between different ingredients in the mix, being imparted to the listener-observer in a particularly transparent fashion. In a live context, no matter how clueless I personally am about electronics I can always follow along as he collates all the various ele...

Navel-Gazers #60 is an interview with K. (Koshiro) Yoshimatsu who is going to talk to us about the Fossil Cocoon collection. Released on Phantom Limb, the label which last year brought us Ellen Zweig’s excellent Fiction Of The Physical (subject of Navel-Gazers #50 ), this is another selection of early 1980s era DIY curiosities which have been dusted off and salvaged from obscurity. It’s music which on a superficial, purely stylistic level strikes one as maybe not all that experimental and yet the closer we listen, and the more we examine the cultural, historical and technological context surrounding its production and distribution, the more profoundly experimental it seems. The selections on ‘Fossil Cocoon’ are handpicked from a discography of around 40 cassettes, all released within a 5-year timespan which must have been an utterly ferocious period of creativity for Mr. Yoshimatsu. There’s a sort of heroism to this stuff I’ve seldom witnessed in contemporary music - we...

Navel-Gazers #59 is an interview with Nick Mott and Aaron Moore of Volcano The Bear who are going to talk to us about The Idea Of Wood . I wouldn’t ordinarily use the word “timeless” to describe…. well, much of anything, but earlier today I was revisiting this album with a fresh set of ears to prepare for our discussion, when I was struck with the most remarkable sense of temporal dislocation. When was this album recorded, was it the 90s, the 2010s? 2004 apparently, although if I didn’t know better I’d just as soon have guessed the 80s, or 70s, who knows. Volcano The Bear always came across to me as a group not so much out of step with the times as happily indifferent, inhabiting some sort of imaginary universe with its own earth-like lexicon of sights and sounds and behaviours which will seem to carry on existing whether we’re paying attention or not. But I do recall now what first caught my attention: it was this cover image - one of Nick’s - from the ‘The Idea Of Wood’ ...

Navel-Gazers #58 is an interview with Hildegard Westerkamp who is going to talk to us about Transformations . In the Navel-Gazers-sphere there are certain artists whose names come up again and again. Hildegard is one of those artists, and it’s usually on the topic of sound walks, an approach which she has pioneered since way back in the 70s. In my case it was upon encountering this collection ’Transformations’ that I really became fixated upon her work. What I love about these compositions is that while Hildegard is not shy about processing and reconstituting source recordings, there’s always something tethering it all to experiential reality in a way which seems distinctly alive . And that’s a topic we touched upon leading up to this interview, when we were deciding between an email chain or a spoken conversation. At the outset, it was something either of us could have gone either way on, but when Hildegard described the spoken format as seeming more “alive”, I knew that ...