ponedjeljak, 1. listopada 2012.

Sone Institute - A Model Life






Roman Bezdyk nostalgičan je za vremenom koje nikad nije postojalo. Psihodrama izmišljanja konvulzivne tehnologije vremena.
Stručna dijagnoza: spoken-word space rock, crime film bongo breaks, synth bloop, wah dub-funk.




streaming ovdje

www.soneinstitute.co.uk



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A Model Life brings Roman Bezdyk’s unique and ambitious style out to play again with instantly familiar loops, mid-bar trips and assorted quirk. Witchcraft and Pornography, the opening track to the album, sets off with an echolalic electric guitar riff, like Hendrix on a merry-go-round, while M’Ling introduces a spaghetti western-esque snippet that repeats catchily, like an over-caffeinated ear worm.
Sone Institute offers a soundtrack to a world that doesn’t exist (and perhaps shouldn’t), as in The World is a Confusion, where 80’s electronic beats and honking psychodrama intermingle with a vocal that makes sure we know: ‘the world is confusion, a spiral drawn in the sand…’
Where Curious Memories delved into the sonic toy box with toddler like glee, A Model Life uses Bezdyk’s highly skilled audio juggling to sure footed effect with an album that also shows off attention span and subtlety in spades.
The album features a host of guest appearances including Nil Frahm, Dale Grundle (The Sleeping Years/Catchers) and Katie Inglish (Isnaj Dui). The stunning artwork is by Nick Cobb, from his photo series ‘The Car Park’.
‘A Model Life’ follows Sone Institute’s 2010 debut, Curious Memories, and his collaboration with Dollboy - The Sum and The Difference. He is currently taking part in the Long Division with Remainders ‘Collision/Detection’ audio series (released on Front & Follow), along with Hong Kong in the 60s, West Norwood Cassette Library, The Doomed Bird of Providence and many more, and will be touring in the autumn. - frontandfollow.bigcartel.com/


Sone Institute is a portal into the fertile mind of Roman Bezdyk, the producer and multi-instrumentalist responsible for the excellent ‘A Model Life’. Interestingly, while retaining a core of spectral electronics, the album is full of recorded instruments rather than the usual spooked samples and loops of other practitioners of Hauntology, an aesthetic that Sone Institute shares several ideas with – broken kitsch, odd library music, twisted 70s TV theme tunes.
Where Bezdyk carves a niche is in the variety of moods, atmospheres and styles employed throughout ‘A Model Life’; creating a messy, eccentric, but coherent collage of sounds. The album covers screaming guitar solos, spoken-word space rock, crime film bongo breaks, synth bloop, heavy on the wah dub-funk, Wichita Lineman strings, brittle glitch dynamics, and, on ‘Back at Yesterday,’ the audio equivalent of a backdrop of swaying palm trees, occasionally skipping and pixellating, alerting you to its artificiality. ‘A Model Life’ even finds room for the languid post-rock ballardry of ‘Struck By a Rock,’ in which thick slow bass, softly brushed drums, 3am chord changes, handclaps and banjo contrive to create something completely captivating. The title track is simply beautiful, disparate elements of strummed guitar, flute-synth and electronic hum periodically faint into an unfurling clockwork wonder of clicks, whistles, piano and parps of brass.
If all this sounds like an attack of industrial strength whimsy, it really isn’t. Bezdyk is obviously a producer and arranger of great talent to be able to martial this upturned toy box into coherent songs. Its peaks and troughs are full of enough invention to fill other artists’ whole albums.- Michael H



Sample-based music can often relish untidy splicing and ragged loops – look at the joins! – as though emphasising its synthetic creation. Roman Bezdyk (aka Sone Institute) on “A Model Life” delivers a seamless, richly organic sound-world where it’s difficult to spot the joins but also to see what is appropriation and what is invention, what is studio reproduction and what is real, live instrumentation. These fourteen songs also come across like a genre-hopping, carefully sequenced mixtape –dense, vocal-laden songs gliding into looser instrumentals and retro-lounge playfulness over the course of a 54 minute excursion from J Dilla beats (‘The World Is A Confusion’) to Ryuichi Sakamoto revery (‘Little Walsingham’) to Sergio Leone re-wiring Alan Hawkshaw (‘M’Ling’) and back again. There are occasional glitchy hiccups in the smooth flow just to catch you out but mainly an astonishing, shape-shifting variety.


The album lurches into life with hairy rock guitar work-out in ‘Witchcraft and Pornography’ and ends cryptically with slippery psychedelic guitar and distorted vocal samples in the sleep-deprived ‘Fear and Nappiness’. In between there’s 60s spy intrigue as soundtracked by Blue Note in ‘Frozen Leaves – Falling From Trees’, the silky strings library music of ‘Back At Yesterday’, the torch soul meets scrap-yard folk stirrings of ‘Struck By A Rock’, the poignant whistling of Sparklehorse instrumental out-take ‘A Model Life’ or the gauzy ambience of Boards Of Canada in ‘Cars And Rain’. And more.
Being released on Front And Follow, home of undefinable esoterica, and with plaudits from The Wire (who also stream a companion track to this album release on their website) could lead you to label Sone Institute’s second album as 'experimental', as iTunes Gracenote service does. But this does not mean obtuse or difficult. Far from it. Like the cover artwork – from a photographic series ‘The Car Park’ by Nick Cobb – your perspective changes frequently, it is difficult to divine what is real and what is a model in this hazy trompe l’oeil but "A Model Life" is a refreshing, revitalising listen that constantly draws you in, revealing more detail and surprise in its elegant, serpentine unwinding. - follyfollyfolly.blogspot.com/




This Moment is Already a Memory (2012)
fandf.bandcamp.com/album/this-moment-is-already-a-memory
 

Sone Institute & Dollboy: Exclusive track

Image: Sone Institute (Front & Follow) and Dollboy (Second Language, Static Caravan)Photograph by Michael Rodgers
Listen to a track from Sone Institute & Dollboy, exclusive to The Wire...
Sone Institute (Front & Follow) and Dollboy (Second Language, Static Caravan) have recently come together to produce The Sum And The Difference, a new mini-album released by Front & Follow as a download and a limited edition 3” CD. The label describes the release as a “home spun collection of hazy acoustic tunes and electronic interventions. Existing material from each artist was swapped, reworked/reimagined by the other to create a collection of miniatures that flow together as one long piece.”

This track, free and exclusive to The Wire, sees Sone Institute remixing Dollboy’s “California”, from his album A Beard Of Bees.  - The Wire


DOLLBOY - The Sum And the Difference image

Dollboy & Sone Institute,  The Sum And the Difference

This all-too short collection of folktronic instrumentals and sketched songs is the result of a collaboration between Dollboy's Oliver Cherer and Roman Bezdyk of Sone Institute.  Clocking in at a mere seventeen minutes in total length, this EP  certainly doesn't outstay its welcome - that old adage "small but perfectly formed" springs immediately to mind.  The seven tracks flow between one another beautifully - giving a sense of fluid continuity - but it still functions as a series of standalone moments too.  'Play For Today' is especially memorable, sounding uncannily like it might be a lost Robert Wyatt song thanks to a vividly forlorn vocal, while 'A Slow Reader' beautifully combines stray electronic textures with swooning string sections and 'Hotel Oriental' shifts into a pastoral mode, setting riverside field recordings amongst a playful soundscape of pianos, acoustic guitars and mellotrons.  Lovely stuff. - boomkat

Sone Institute, Curious Memories 

jonny mugwump



A gong, a sonic flash of lightning and 'Inter Assylum Cross Country' comes on like a Spaghetti Western in Leeds — looped Wurlitzer, sporadic timpani, rich startled synth lines and a becalmed climax with brief choral reverb. Quick sharp, less than two minutes later it's a hard jolt into 'The Wind Began to Switch' with stunted grimy guitar hiccup, stabbing brass eruptions, a clipped Edie Hazelesque wah wah solo, handclaps, several seemingly dissociated rhythmic foundations (one coming on pure My Bloody Valentine), orchestral flourishes in a Blaxploitation stylee, a rapid breakdown into cartoon theatricals, a fuck-off choir . . . OK, I really could go on and we've still not made the four minute mark yet.
Welcome, then, to the overloaded world of Sone Institue (aka Roman Bezdyk) and Curious Memories, his debut album, on the excellent Manchester-based Front & Follow label. As you might already have gathered, Sone Institute's methodology is one of sampladelic chaos: seemingly, to throw as much eclectic sound (found sound, stringed instruments, classroom percussion) at the wall as is inhumanly possible and see what sticks. It's a high-wire act and there's no denying that the album constantly threatens to degenerate into a right wacky mess. But Bezdyk confidently dances on said wire so nimbly that it might as well be a football pitch. As frenetic as Curious Memories is, as insanely diverse as its sound sources are, the different elements never jar with each other — there's a distinct lack of both tonal and aesthetic friction. Let's face it, it's not actually difficult to just find a bunch of different noises and mix them together — but to make it work is quite an achievement. Luke Vibert has always been a master sample sandwich-maker but sometimes he can produce extraordinarily irritating results, like mixing a flute with a dentist's drill and a badger and a harp and the war on drugs or something.
Sone Institute has real feeling for the carnivalesque. This album feels like a joyous and uncyncial celebration of music — a hyperactive beanbag of sound. 'On Tree Hill' features an utterly infectious soup of Indian strings, a Wurlitzer burbling out the melody to 'I Only Have Eyes for You', brass fanfares, restless flute, dislocated orchestrations — all tied up in a truly delightful waltz. It's not all a rush: Bezdyk can let go of the giddy whirl and allow himself to breathe, as on 'Dark Forest', which mixes Victorialand-era Cocteau Twins guitars against birdsong, backwards harp, distant voices, seagulls and those crucial miniature electronic melodies. The final track, 'Sleep Has Its Embers', is a particularly gorgeous collage of strings, mysterious drones and a plaintive plucked harp. At just over a minute long, it's a beautiful way to bring proceedings to a close.
In some ways Curious Memories comes across as the more good-time twin of last year's superb Circulations by Gesellschaft Zur Emanzipation Des Samples. While it might disregard the latter's guerrilla-like intellectual concerns, there's a wildly invigorating approach to ingredients that Heston Blumenthal would be proud of, and a gleeful disregard for narrative. However, it's never so abstract as to forget its purpose for pleasure — Sone Institue will effortlessly brighten your darkest day. - jonny mugwump



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