I've released a couple new solo things over the course of the past half-year, while the old forum was down, if you want to have a listen.
I suppose they can loosely be described as electro-acoustic music, or homebrew musique concrète.



Blurbage:

"Ballad of the External Life", Rrill Bell's debut LP for Elevator Bath, takes its inspiration from the Hugo von Hofmannsthal poem of the same title (“Ballade des äußeren Lebens” in the original German), and features hybrid treatments of tuned percussion source material, swarm-like passages of next-level (cassette) tape manipulation, immersive micro-sound environments, delicate drone, embedded field recordings (ad-hoc dictaphone installations captured in various outdoor settings) and stolen moments from family events both heavy and casual.



Blurbage:

Rrill Bell's latest album, Blade's Return, the inaugural release on Klappkart, is an audio fable, a radiophonic narrative work relating the inner and outer reality of the handsaw Blade as he undertakes a journey back to the forest where he renounced cutting, to sing a song of regret and seek redemption. At the heart of the piece, which expands on the artist's unique personal approach to the cassette tape as a highly malleable medium for sound production and deepens his previous practice of "augmented reality" and embedded location recording, is an in-situ exploration of the "singing" saw as an expressive sound source for experimental music.


Thanks for listening!

This is nice. Going to hold off until tomorrow and have it for ambience while tackling rewrites. Good stuff!

Thanks, mate. Very nice to meet and read you again here.

I enjoyed both of those - thank you, Jim. I shall seek out more.

Thanks, Mark!

About to deep dive!

I really enjoy Ballad of the External Life. It is a fantastic example of the rewards of close listening when it comes to textures. I listened on cans as there is a bit of traffic at the moment. I am looking forward monitors by candlelight when things are quieter. Bravo, this is really really good. The composition itself is a triumph of integration over pastiche. This can be dangerous territory I think, no?

seby wrote: I really enjoy Ballad of the External Life. It is a fantastic example of the rewards of close listening when it comes to textures. I listened on cans as there is a bit of traffic at the moment. I am looking forward monitors by candlelight when things are quieter. Bravo, this is really really good. The composition itself is a triumph of integration over pastiche. This can be dangerous territory I think, no?

Thank you, Seby!

Definitely to the last bit, that is the challenge and the fun for me, using a heterogenous approach to material and methods and a healthy dose of chance practices so that it breathes and surprises in myriad little ways while remaining focused and personal, intimate, not arbitrary. I certainly enjoy a lot of music that is fairly abritrary or depersonalised too though, of course. Thanks again for listening!

New one out today on Elevator Bath.

FALSE FLAG RAPTURE



Blurbage:

Following up on 2020's critically acclaimed "Ballad of the External Life" LP, Rrill Bell's latest outing on Elevator Bath is a complex amalgamation of acoustic source materials (metallophones, winds, strings, and brass), (cassette) tape treatments, and digital assemblages, which coalesced over a period of six years, starting from the artist's desire to build a highly personal album around a turn-of-the-century recording of his late grandmother singing an impromptu hymn in Slovak dialect at a family gathering, resurrected from memory after lying dormant for 50+ years. Working through a family legacy of religious hallucinations/visions, the album (in spite of its tongue-in-cheek title) unironically explores themes of potentially staged transcendence, ecstasy of suspicious origins, vulnerability, inspired/anxious states of mind, fractured identity, doubt, rupture, redemption by proxy, and the dilemma of being forced to adopt a perspective in a contingent universe.

Rrill Bell: chimes, vibraphone, crotales, glockenspiel, drum machines, tapes, dictaphones, tape decks, and electronics

featuring contributions from
Felix Fritsche: clarinets/flutes
Koenraad Ecker: cello
Alex Morsey: contrabass/tuba

Mastered by James Plotkin

Woot! On this ASAP : )