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 ...

Navel-Gazers #57 is an interview with Mike Holland a.k.a. Kinver Pond who is going to talk to us about “Moonrise Over Legends Gym”. I’m a sucker for titles, and this one is instantly ringing in my ear-for-the-absurd: what a grand, magisterial turn of phrase to describe something so banal. So it is in the sound-world of Kinver Pond, where the artist can be heard mumbling inexplicable snippets of text amidst an elaborate medley of field recordings which - one suspects - were taken close to home. Its text-rich visual world too, glimpsed in collage-art inserts which accompany the physical Chocolate Monk release, seems cut from the same cloth. Mike entered my orbit courtesy of Navel-Gazers alumnus Paul Margree , and their backgrounds strike me as similar in having arrived at this kind of activity from a sort of non-music, maybe more literary perspective, which seems to bring something quite fresh and different to the table. Mike is also local, and I’m pleased to say this is th...

Navel-Gazers #56 is an interview with Agathe Max who is going to talk to us about SHADOWW . My spell-check is already acting up on this one, but thanks to some informative and rather thought-provoking liner notes, I’ve been able to attribute a source for that spare W, intentionally placed here - I think - to denote something called Shadow Work . It’s something maybe very akin to the artistic process where we uncover new elements of expression, normally suppressed at the surface levels of day-to-day communication. The music of ‘SHADOWW’ is certainly that way or so it seems to me, balancing a series of gorgeous beat-less passages which drift by in a floating, tentative sort of way - that is, the odd numbered tracks - against the alternating high-energy even-numbered tracks, which feature some of the most inventive use of rhythm I’ve encountered in some time. It definitely comes across as music which has been conjured up from the subconscious… fortunately, the artist is a mo...

Navel-Gazers #55 is an interview with Hardi Kurda who is going to talk to us about Radiola Springs . In the world of music “on the record” there are various elements which may first catch the listener’s attention… sometimes it’s a cover image or a title, sometimes it’s knowing the artist personally or by reputation, or through their other work… occasionally - rarely for me - it’s the music itself which first crosses one’s ears. What drew my attention to ‘Radiola Springs’ was a paragraph of liner notes associated to the release, which describe radios searching for information, the caper of a stolen violin, and the artist having illegally immigrated to Europe from Iraqi Kurdistan. I’m reminded of the motivation behind Navel-Gazers: we often encounter artists through their work - an art object - but art appreciation is about looking behind the object to interrogate the real life context. ‘Radiola Springs’ does indeed convey that paragraph’s stories over four curiously-titled ...

Navel-Gazers #54 is an interview with Viv Corringham who is going to talk to us about her latest release Soundwalkscapes , on the Flaming Pines label. This album caught my attention immediately for a number of reasons, starting with the title: what’s a Soundwalkscape? I’m sure we’ll get the scoop from Viv - whose website is captioned “singing-walking-listening” - and looking more closely at the titles while making my way through the music, I’m already starting to grasp it. The foundation underneath each track here is a sound-walk through a specific place. They’re not exotic locations - not to me anyway, having grown up on Long Island, and settled in London… likewise one gets the sense that to Viv - another artist who vacillates between the U.S. and U.K. - as well, these settings are incidental. The liner notes explain: “It began with a self-imposed rule: on the first Monday of every month in 2023, wherever I find myself, I will take a walk. I’ll record the walk, the envi...