Navel-Gazers #84 is an interview with Dominique Golden and Nik Clifford a.k.a. SILKess Demon who are going to talk to us about Life is art, Art is life . It seems from the moment the 21st century began, we culture-loving human beings have had to endure grim prognostications about the demise of physical media. There were to be no more records, no more books, nothing but endless streams of pixels ricocheting around virtual networks somewhere beyond physical space. Is it me or have things turned out very different? Because I can scarcely imagine anything more characteristic of 2020s life - the one I’ve been experiencing anyway - than an album like this: a vinyl record cut on a lathe in the artists' own home, in a limited edition with handmade sleeves, which I first encountered at a local poetry and music event in Walthamstow. Its 11 tracks, which explore folk tradition in amusing and unexpected ways, are like little gifts to the listener. Part of the fun here is to disce...

Navel-Gazers #83 is an interview with Han-kyul Kwon who is going to talk to us about The Other Side Of Everything . I have a confession to make: I don’t always care for concept albums. It’s a statement which is pretty vague given the nebulous nature of the term “concept album”, but I suppose that when I observe a single premise being left to play out programatically over the course of an album, or in a performance or in any artistic offering really, I tend to get a bit bored. Now and then however, an artist introduces a concept so singular, so rich, that I wind up absolutely spellbound. ‘The Other Side Of Everything’ is comprised strictly of incidental audio from iPhone Live Photos which, if you’re familiar with the feature, are actually 3-second video clips. What’s striking about this is not only the clips being short, each one imparting only momentary sonic information before moving on to the next, but also their lack of artistic intention. They’re offcuts, audio detritu...

Navel-Gazers #82 is an interview with Hali Palombo who is going to talk to us about Insane Rarities . It goes without saying that we can learn a lot by examining an artist’s earliest work - that is, if we can access it. Musicians often describe early throwaway material which they’d be mortified for anyone else to hear, and which we never do get to hear. Not Hali Palombo. Amused by her performance at the Colour Out Of Space festival in Brighton earlier this year, I found myself scrolling all the way to the bottom of her Bandcamp page - a thing I often do, seeking out an artist’s earliest work - only to find this collection. Borne out of “a brief interest in not really making music, but making noises and talking”, the twelve tracks on ‘Insane Rarities’ are presented exactly as they were spontaneously conceived however many years ago in the American midwest. And that’s a location which seems to emanate from these pieces, not only in the evocations of state fairs and weird s...

Navel-Gazers #81 is an interview with Bill Nelson who is going to talk to us about the Trial By Intimacy series, released in 1985. I often prepare for these discussions by perusing the artist’s previous interviews. What I uncovered on this occasion was a wealth of discussion on topics such as record deals, lineup changes, transatlantic tours and so on from the rock press, who are primarily concerned with Bill’s mid-70s band Be Bop Deluxe. But what we encounter on ’Trial By Intimacy’ - originally a series of four releases on Bill’s own label Cocteau Records - is the work of an artist who by that point was pursuing more personal, contemplative forms of expression within the realm of his home studio. The album art across the series, all paper collage and oil crayons, is a series in and of itself: conceived, signed and dated by Bill, it’s the mnemonic bridge whereby these abstract sounds have managed to secure a permanent foothold in my imagination. Proudly described as “unpo...

Navel-Gazers #80 is an interview with Nika Son who is going to talk to us about ASLOPE . Every few months I set aside some time to research music released in the past couple of years. The amount of material floating out there can get overwhelming, but I always manage to uncover some gems thanks to my keen spider-sense! While I wouldn’t say that the album title is the only thing which drew me to ‘ASLOPE’, it certainly leapt out. What is “aslope” anyway: is that a name, a neologism, malapropism, just an obscure word? The music itself - which I’ve since played back repeatedly - seems to occupy a permanent corner in my mind now, with that singular title dangling overhead. Described as an “ode to the nocturnal world”, ‘ASLOPE’ drifts through the ears like nightly consciousness itself, broken from time to time by distinct snippets of waking life that seem to emerge and recede from a crepuscular haze. And perhaps we the listeners are in transit, being ushered around the haze by s...

Navel-Gazers #79 is an interview with bill bissett who is going to talk to us about awake in th red desert . Released in 1968 on a Canadian label called See/Hear Productions, it’s a long-standing object of interest for adventurous listeners, residing somewhere beyond-the-beyond at a nexus between concrete-poetry and psychedelic music’s outer fringes. It was also - in the decades leading up to my own first encounter with it while working at a record store in the 2000s - quite the collectors item, originally a limited edition of only 500 copies which was issued with a companion book full of poems, photos and ink drawings by mr. bissett. Revisiting th red desert on this occasion I’m struck by the album’s variety, the moments where its memorable freak-outs are offset by flashes of raw, unaccompanied sound poetry, along with calmer moments and even electronic passages I had forgotten about. I’ve taken special care to de-capitalise bill’s name here, as not only is he the creator...

Navel-Gazers #78 is an interview with Selwa Abd a.k.a. Bergsonist who is going to talk to us about ASL أصل ⴰⵙⵍ . From my first encounter with its title I knew there had to be a story about this album. Those last three characters are in Tifinagh script which relates to the artist’s North African origins, and in fact convey the word “origin” itself alongside Latin and Arabic scripts. In the liner notes for ‘ASL’ we learn about Selwa’s visits to Errachidia, her ancestral village of origin in Eastern Morocco, from which many of these sounds derive. The work is sonically adventurous, fanciful even - veering into textures and timbres well outside the palette of everyday life in Errachidia or anywhere - and yet Selwa seems to approach her subject through it all with a reverence for heritage, family ties and the local Amazigh community which strikes one as a personal motivation underpinning the whole project. Selwa has lived in New York for around as long as I’ve lived in the UK:...