Hidden Shoal News
Markus Mehr “Re-Directed” Out Now!
We’re proud to announce the official release of the powerful new work from German experimentalist Markus Mehr. Re-Directed is a confrontational soundwork of digital surrealism, underpinned by a potent and timely theme: our dependence upon digital technology and communication, and how this dependence renders us vulnerable to exploitation. The project originated as an audiovisual performance with long-time collaborator Stefanie Sixt, for which Markus Mehr recorded hours of sound from servers, hard disks and mobile phones using induction microphones, rendering the inaudible audible and bringing the background noise of digital life into focus. Mehr’s lens is trained on our uncritical reliance upon the invisible systems that infiltrate our everyday lives, silently eating away at our capacity for self-determination.
“pushing his emotionally-charged sonic sculptures into much more dangerous and unpredictable territory… Totally mesmerizing and beautiful.” – Decoder Magazine on Binary Rooms
Perhaps the most confrontational and abstract release in Mehr’s discography thus far, Re-Directed challenges the narrow confines of music, moving towards the realm of musique concrète. It demands active engagement from the listener, alongside acknowledgement of its conceptual nature. As challenging and complex as it may be, Re-Directed is an incredibly powerful and immersive listening experience for those willing to undertake the journey on Mehr’s terms.
The album is available now in CD and digital formats. Head to Markus Mehr’s BandCamp to secure yourself a copy of this brilliant release.
Slow Dancing Society Featured on Latest Cafe del Mar Release
We’re excited to announce that yet another Hidden Shoal artist has been featured on a Cafe del Mar compilation. The gorgeous Slow Dancing Society track ‘Be There’ takes pride of place on Cafe del Mar’s newest compilation Ambience. The album also features work by the likes of Carbon Based Life Forms, Robert Rich, Chris Coco, Kodomo (as remixed by Loscil) and many more wonderful artists.
Check out a trailer for the album here and buy the album on iTunes. Don’t forget to check out the sublime debut Slow Dancing Society album that ‘Be There’ is cut from, The Sound of Lights When Dim. It’s hard to believe that the album has it’s 10th anniversary at the end of this year!
Antonymes Featured on the Gideon Coe Show (BBC Radio)
Another of our artists continues to gets some love on BBC Radio. Antonymes‘ ‘Towards Tragedy and Dissolution’, taken from his stunning new album (For Now We See) Through A Glass Dimly, has just been featured on Gideon Coe’s BBC Radio show. The show is available for streaming for short time on the BBC website.
Read more about Antonymes and stream and purchase his new album here.
Chloe March Featured on The Tom Robinson Show (BBC)
The title track off Chloe March’s new EP The Orpheus Pavement has just been featured on a recent episode of the Tom Robinson show on BBC Radio. The show is available for streaming for short time on the BBC website. And if you’ve not already lost yourself in Chloe’s new EP then you can check it out here.
New Antonymes Album Out Now!
We’re excited to announce the official release of (For Now We See) Through A Glass Dimly, the stunning new album by neo-classical ambient artist Antonymes. These 10 pieces have an emotional potency and compositional dexterity that surpasses the acclaimed body of work that precedes them, drawing you into their evocative world and demanding engagement. The album includes contributions from Christoph Berg (Field Rotation), composer Stefano Guzzetti, James Banbury (The Auteurs), Joanna Swan (Ilya) and writer Paul Morley. Mixed by Stefano Guzzetti and Paul Humphreys (OMD), and mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri (The Sight Below), the album’s depth of sound is awe-inspiring.
“Conveys a sense of wonder while underlining the bittersweet feeling of being finite in an infinite world.” – A Closer Listen
The album is available on CD, in a glorious six-panel full-colour card sleeve with 8-page insert, and in digital formats. Head to Antonymes Bandcamp for CD and digital and iTunes, Amazon, Spotity et al for all your other digital needs.
New Memorybell Single, Forthcoming Album
Hidden Shoal is proud to announce the release of ‘Somnolent’ by piano minimalist Memorybell, taken from his debut album Obsolete. Memorybell is the ambient project of Grant Hazard Outerbridge, who in February 2014 awoke in a hospital with no memory of how he had arrived. He was diagnosed with transient global amnesia, a condition that causes the brain to temporarily stop making new memories. When he returned to the piano, Outerbridge found his previous compositions sounded garish. He pared them down to their essence and, along with new, more spacious material, constructed a set of variegated and subtle songs that explore the interplay between dissonance and silence. Recorded live in a single sitting using just a creaky grand piano and two microphones, Obsolete is as concerned with exploring the spaces between notes as the notes themselves, giving each song room to breathe and encouraging the ear to wander. The percussive qualities of the piano are almost dissolved by the air surrounding each note, leaving an aching space for the tones to resonate.
‘Somnolent’ is available now to stream and download. Obsolete will see release on the 2nd of June.
Erik Nilsson Single and Forthcoming Reissue of Debut Album
Hidden Shoal is excited to announce the forthcoming reissue of Erik Nilsson’s superb debut album Recollage (23/5/16). To get you in the mood we have the wonderful album track ‘Tail Lights’ available for download and streaming.
There is a vibrant playfulness across Recollage’s nine tracks, with each song mapping out its own discrete world. Nilsson skilfully mixes electronics with live instruments and field recordings, before subjecting the songs to digital manipulation, creating an uncanny and arresting blend that is often as technically dizzying as it is musically and emotionally engaging. Glitchy yet exquisitely tuneful, Recollage’s music-box melodies bring to mind Björk’s Vespertine, while its compositional style is reminiscent of The Books’ cut-up approach to songcraft.
The album is clearly a vivid precursor to acclaimed second album Hearing Things (2015), but also its own unique creature. First released through Luxus-Artica Records in 2011, Recollage has received extra instrumentation, been fully re-mastered, and also includes the original version of album track ‘Rumore del Roma’.
“Nilsson’s work lands in something of a sweet spot for me as a listener, taking approachable bases, things possessed of an easy, lilting beauty, and then working them through this filter or that concept, finding workable juxtapositions and pushing envelopes as he goes” – Hypnagogue on Hearing Things
Recollage also joins the Hidden Shoal licensing catalogue and all album tracks are available now for your next moving image project or compilation. Contact us for more info.
Markus Mehr – New Video & Forthcoming Album
We’re proud to announce the forthcoming release of Re-Directed, the sixth album by experimental German artist Markus Mehr. The album will see release via Hidden Shoal on the 29th of April. The first taste of the album is available now thanks to the amazing music video for the track ‘Re-Directed 4’, directed by German experimental video artist Stefanie Sixt.
“pushing his emotionally-charged sonic sculptures into much more dangerous and unpredictable territory… Totally mesmerizing and beautiful.” – Decoder Magazine on Binary Rooms
Re-Directed is a confrontational soundwork of digital surrealism, underpinned by a potent and timely theme: our dependence upon digital technology and communication, and how this dependence renders us vulnerable to exploitation. The project originated as an audiovisual performance with long-time collaborator Stefanie Sixt, for which Markus Mehr recorded hours of sound from servers, hard disks and mobile phones using induction microphones, rendering the inaudible audible and bringing the background noise of digital life into focus. Mehr’s lens is trained on our uncritical reliance upon the invisible systems that infiltrate our everyday lives, silently eating away at our capacity for self-determination.
Perhaps the most confrontational and abstract release in Mehr’s discography thus far, Re-Directed challenges the narrow confines of music, moving towards the realm of musique concrète. It demands active engagement from the listener, alongside acknowledgement of its conceptual nature. As challenging and complex as it may be, Re-Directed is an incredibly powerful and immersive listening experience for those willing to undertake the journey on Mehr’s terms.
New Chloe March EP, Remixes & Video!
Hidden Shoal is excited to present the release of The Orpheus Pavement, the new six-track EP by English artist Chloë March, featuring new song ‘The Orpheus Pavement’, along with two originals from her acclaimed album Nights Bright Days and three remixes (by Lvmark, Sam Atkin, and Chloë March).
The Orpheus Pavement is dreamy, slow–motion pop music, pulsating with sensuality. Listening to the EP feels like surreptitiously ingesting laudanum and wandering half-dazed through a secret garden that’s slowly shifting and warping around you. As with so much of Chloë March’s work, it was inspired by the mythical – the largest Roman mosaic ever found in Britain, which depicts Orpheus charming nymphs, tigers and other creatures with his songs. In this instance, the story is just the start, as March’s compositions bloom from reverberating piano and voice into evocative soundworlds that contain multitudes. Two of the songs are further transformed by remixers Lvmark, Sam Atkin, and March herself, into shimmering refractions of their former selves.
“a luminous voice, a smoky alto that unfurls like a plume of cigarette smoke, its velvety tone a sensual narcotic… it’s hard not to think of the mythological sirens who used their hypnotic voices to lure sailors ashore” – textura
Oft compared to singular artists such as Nina Simone, Beth Gibbons and Elizabeth Fraser, Chloë March follows her own independent path, writing, engineering and producing from her home studio in south-east England. Inhabiting musical territory somewhere between art song and folk, dream-pop and electronica, the ambient and the cinematic, March embraces all these influences to create poetic, emotionally charged and intensely atmospheric songs and soundworlds. Lvmark is an electronic music producer hailing from Northern Sweden, drawing influence from the isolation and vastness of his homeland to create echoing electronica. Sam Atkin is a Fremantle-based ambient and experimental producer operating out of his shed-bedroom, who released his debut album Gently, Quietly in 2015 through Workplace Safety CDRs, and has been keeping it slow and sad ever since.
The Orpheus Pavement is available now via BandCamp and the usual digital stores. You can also check out the title track and the two remixes by Lvmark and Sam Atkin at the Hidden Shoal SoundCloud. Chloe has also produced a beautiful music video for ‘The Orpheus Pavement’ which you can check out over at YouTube.
New Antonymes Album Now Available for Pre-Order
We’re excited to announce the availability of pre-orders for Antonymes‘ new album (For Now We See) Through A Glass Dimly, which features contributions from Christoph Berg (Field Rotation), composer Stefano Guzzetti, James Banbury (The Auteurs), Joanna Swan (Ilya) and writer Paul Morley, with mixing by Stefano Guzzetti and Paul Humphreys (OMD), and mastering by Rafael Anton Irisarri (The Sight Below).
The 10-track CD comes in a glorious six-panel full-colour card sleeve with 8-page insert. Album pre-orders include the immediate download of the 2 pre-release tracks (‘Delicate Power’ and ‘Towards Tragedy and Dissolution’), plus the complete album the moment it’s released. Orders are shipped on or around 21 April 2016. Head to Antonymes Bandcamp and secure yourself a copy of this incredible album.
Hidden Shoal MixTape
