Add to playlist: Jake Muir's church bell soundscapes, plus the week's best new tracks

The Guardian

7 days ago

From Berlin via Los AngelesRecommended if you like Philip Jeck, Félicia Atkinson, Sarah DavachiUp next New album Campana Sonans has just been released
Some of the loveliest ambient music – in that term's truest sense – available to us is the sound of church bells. The cascading notes heralding a wedding are the aural equivalent of the scent of freshly cut grass, in how they evoke British summer time. But played on a large, sombre bell, the monophonic tolling that announces the time seems almost nihilist: a reminder of the ticking clock of our own lives.
All this splendid drama has been heightened by found-sound artist Jake Muir, an American living in Berlin. He has long been an inventive manipulator of sound – 2020's The Hum of Your Veiled Voice pricked its ears up at night-time Berlin, while 2023's Bathhouse Blues blended gay porn soundtracks into rudderless soundscapes – and his latest album, Campana Sonans (available on Bandcamp) is a deeply immersive pair of 20-minute works, built from recordings he made of church bells around Europe. He then applies effects to those recordings, chiefly a shedload of reverb.
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The first piece, Erzklang, focuses on the rather stern, even malevolent sound of church bells in Berlin, drawn out into long drones. The city's club scene seems to throb like a memory of Saturday night on Sunday morning: there's no pulse here, but Erzklang shudders with the reverberation of dub and the metallic beat of techno.
For the second piece, Changes, Muir travelled to the UK and recorded at three churches: St Oswald's in Oswestry, St Bartholomew's in Edgbaston, Birmingham, and Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shakespeare is buried. English bells are often performed through 'change ringing': bells of different notes attached to a giant wheels, which are hauled around by rope-tugging players. This epic instrumentation allows for far more melody than the Berlin piece and, in the way Muir presents the bells, they're almost like Steve Reich-style overlapping phases. In both pieces, the reverb makes the bells sound otherworldly, and yet Muir tempers this by including the chatter of tourists or the sound of footsteps. To listen to Muir's work is to be lifted into a bardo, a between-space, looking back at our lives through soot-coated stained glass.
​BXKS – Zagga DatA subtle yet insinuating digidub bassline powers this sensual club cut from the UK rapper, as she gives dance instructions with the imperious calm of a long-reigning ballroom announcer.
Margo Price – Don't Let the Bastards Get You DownWhat an absolute delight: at a perky trotting tempo, the country singer rails at the stiffs, suits and stuffed shirts in her industry: 'Those tone deaf sons-a-bitches / don't know your rags to riches!'
Drain – Nights Like TheseNinety-odd seconds of funky, pit-shaking hardcore punk from the returning Santa Cruz band, flexing on the balls of their feet until an almighty head-banging breakdown in the final seconds.
Salute – Gbesoke (ft Peter Xan)The speed garage revival continues to rev its engines and hare off down a dual carriageway in a hot hatch, and Salute's latest has a beat like a funkily stuttering exhaust.
Skream and Benga – Good Things Come to Those Who WaitThe dubstep legends serve up early-10s nostalgia on a heavily vibrating silver platter: a Pariah-like note of penetrating digital bass gives way to a gleefully corny trance breakdown.
Nuovo Testamento – Picture PerfectEarly 90s piano house-pop done so faithfully you can feel the coloured disco lights warming your face. The verses are like enormous choruses, making the actual enormous chorus positively gargantuan.
The New Eves – Cow SongOver a glam-rock beat done in folk instrumentation, the Brighton quartet's latest single is inspired by female cow herders in Sweden who use loud calls to communicate across the hills.
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