After
the sell out success of the first series of Mini-CDs, Clay Pipe kicks
off the second series with D.Rothons 'Lonesome Echoes'.
D. Rothon’s third solo release for Clay Pipe, Lonesome Echoes, is a
selection of four beautiful melodic instrumentals, featuring pedal
steel, Omnichord, theremin, flute and live drums – and inspired by the
long-lost south London village of Lonesome.
“My curiosity about Lonesome started years ago when I noticed the name
on the map in the London A to Z, not far from where I grew up. It seemed
such an unlikely name. But it wasn't until recently that I discovered
its slightly odd history…”
The origins of its name lost in the mists of time, the village of
Lonesome emerged in the 19th century from the swampy, isolated lands
between Streatham Vale and Mitcham Common. By the early 1900s intrepid
reporters were already speculating on whether the place was mere myth.
The intervening years saw the rapid rise and fall of Lonesome. Its prospects as a desirable
place to live were compromised by the combined fragrances of piggeries
plus chemical, fireworks and gas mantle factories – which would
undoubtedly have overpowered the sweeter aromas from the nearby lavender
fields of Mitcham. It also gained a reputation as a haunt of footpads,
vagabonds and cutpurses.
A failed development by one “Squire Blake” of aspirational middle class
villas – which became known as Blake's Folly – helped cement Lonesome’s
reputation as a ghost town.
Now long subsumed into suburbia, aside from the odd street and building name little trace remains of Lonesome.
Also in the shop Clay Pipe 2024 calender*, Gilroy Mere 'Gilden Gate' Giclee prints and new black T-shirts.
*initial copies sold out pre-order second run via Bandcamp
Digital through all streaming services and Bandcamp
Clay Pipe Music is thrilled
to announce The Beacons
by Vic Mars - the
enigmatic producers third full length LP for the label. Since 2019s
Inner Roads and Outer
Paths his music has
found a new audience having been used as the soundtrack to the game I
am Dead by British
interactive studio Hollow Ponds.
While
his previous two albums were inspired by the pastoral landscapes of
Herefordshire, The Beacons,
embarks on a journey westward into Wales, inviting listeners into
the rugged terrain of the Brecon Beacons and the Black Mountains.
Using
a darker sonic palette, and pushing the sound of the
Moog synthesizer to the fore, The
Beacons
captures the feel of mountains silhouetted against dramatic skies,
craggy summits and the overall grandeur of the landscape and its rich
folklore.
Stories
of plane crashes, a monument honouring a missing boy, and legends
such the mysterious door within Llyn Cwm Llwch lake— said to open
to an invisible island - all helped shape the making of the record.
With the addition of live drums, viola, a Juno 60 and field
recordings alongside his distinctive Mellotrons and flutes, Vic has
explored new ground, but still maintains the melodic interest and
home spun charm of his earlier records.
Although
now based in London Vic grew up in Hereford, in winter time the
distant ice capped peaks of the Beacons served as a childhood
barometer, a hopeful indicator that the city might also be graced
with snow. In better weather there were days out with family or
friends, clambering up Pen-y-fan or visiting the beautiful waterfalls
at Ystradfellte. All these formative experiences seep into the music
on this record, weaving an enchanting spell that captures the
vastness of the mountain ranges and the stories they tell.
A small repress of Vic Mars' second LP Inner Roads and Outer Paths on green vinyl will be available at the same time.
Clay Pipe will have pre-release copies of both LPs at the Jonny Trunk Groovy Record Fayre on the Saturday October 28th, The Mildmay Club, London, N16 9PR. Please let me know if you would like to reserve a copy.
Clay Pipe is back from a short summer break, and very happy to announce that Andrew Wasylyk's Hearing the Water Before Seeing the Falls has made the long list for the Scottish Album of the Year. Congratulations to Andrew, it is very well deserved!
Also Frances Castle talked to Justin Hopper for his Uncanny Landscapes podcast, always worth a listen, it is available wherever you get your podcasts and via the Uncanny Landscapes Substack.
There are new releases coming this Autumn. Please stay tuned.
CD and DL come with extra track “Pendula" LP includes Bandcamp DL code in sleeve.
Cate
Brooks is back with her seventh release for Clay Pipe Music. Never
one to stand still, ‘Easel Studies’ finds her pushing the
boundaries of sound synthesis and experimentation on the Buchla
Music Easel while still sounding beautifully beguiling and
hypnotically melodic.
“On
this day in 2015, at exactly Midday, I took delivery of a wildly
exotic musical instrument. To call it a synthesizer would be a
misrepresentation; it’s really more of a tactile, living, breathing
entity than anything else. It had originally supposed to have been
delivered on the day before, but had somehow been mislaid in the
labyrinths of the Royal Mail sorting office at Elephant and Castle.
I
sat patiently and quietly all morning, waiting for its imminent
arrival. I had already read through the ‘manual’, which is more
of a concept / design for living, written by synthesis legend Allen
Strange.
With
Noon approaching, I became a little anxious- my local postie, Barrie,
was usually here by about 10:30am and there was no sign of him.
At
11:58, Barrie walked past, completely ignoring my house. Obviously
concerned, I stood at the door and waited for him to walk back toward
his van. As he came back, he smiled and I called out, quizzically
“Barrie?”. His reply was “Yes I have!” and walked back to his
van, collecting a large box and bringing it to my door. I remember
the weather was muggy and my neighbour was attending to her rose
bushes, as the cheery and helpful postie deftly navigated around her
busy secateurs.
I
took the box inside, opened the top and just looked at the inner box
for a while. I took a photo of it, which I still have. It felt like
quite a momentous occasion, because I felt that this instrument would
take me to different sonic spaces than I was used to. It wasn’t my
first experience with Don Buchla’s instruments by any means, as I’d
learned to use his 200e system. But this was quite a different beast.
My
cat Brillo came to inspect the box and I set the Music Easel up on
the floor and plugged it in. The result of that very first experiment
became “Pendula”.
In
the following days and weeks of that summer, I created many more
experiments on the Easel, quite often with Brillo either sat on me as
I played, or trying to climb up on the instrument itself, attempting
to move the faders and switches himself.
By
the end of August, I had amassed some thirty-something pieces, which
I put aside for future reference. I had learned a lot about this
instrument, its idiosyncrasies, subtleties and ways of working.
Sadly,
Brillo died in September of 2015. I like to think that his last
summer with me was a comforting experience, curling up and listening
to the sonic experiments taking place, as he regularly did for the
sixteen years he was with me. The first track on the album, “Con
Brillo” is my little tribute to him.
Fast
forward to 2021 and I rediscovered all of these experiments. Some
were almost unlistenable, but some had a beguiling charm about them-
perhaps the sound of someone not really knowing what they’re
getting into. They needed mixing and balancing, so I set to work. I
also wrote a new piece, with exactly the same recording chain, in the
same way, in the same room. This became the suitably titled final
track “Hindsight”.
The
Music Easel has remained a constant source of sonic worlds for me to
explore. It became the main instrument on the album Agri Montana,
for example and has cropped up on many other records I’ve made
since.
I
would especially like to thank David at Postmodular for selling the
Music Easel to me, after phoning him and disturbing his Sunday
afternoon outing to Hyde Park (sorry about that David). I always
promised I would send him a copy of something I had produced on it,
so hopefully he will enjoy Easel Studies.
As
I finish writing this, I notice that it is, once more, exactly
Midday. I
hope you enjoy Easel Studies too.”
Zyggurat
is an electronic music project fronted by Pete Grimshaw on modular
synthesizer featuring Piera Onacko on accordion, and Nathan
England-Jones on drums. They have released two EPs "Beyond the
Breaks" (2018) and "Earth II" (2020), as well as a
self titled LP in 2022. The band have received acclaim for their
skilful and spontaneous modular synth performances, drawing special
praise for the sonic interplay between the synth work and the organic
flow of the drums.
“The
name ‘Zyggurat’ derives from the inverted ziggurat of
Birmingham’s lost brutalist library, designed by John Madin. It was
completed in 1974 and demolished in 2016, and ties in with
Birmingham’s history for rebuilding and remodelling its
architecture and cultural heritage. I treated the album as a journey
though this cycle of destruction and regeneration. It
comes down to feelings on the passage of time, utopian hopes,
journeys, dreams, reclamation, and nostalgia. “ Pete Grimshaw 2023
“Lithe,
evolving, lyrical, highly recommended!” - Dan
Bean
“This
is great, a proper trippy sea of synth-jazz” - James
Holden
“I
love the Zyggurat album. A flowing cosmic conversation between the
modular synth and drums. Who ever knew such beautiful cosmic
jazz would come from Birmingham” - Surgeon
“Highly
recommend checking out Zyggurat” - Paddy
Shine, Gnod
There will be launch shows for the CD in Birmingham and Hackney - we will be holding some CDs back to sell at these events. Drop me a line if you are coming to one of them and would like to reserve a CD.
Read Bob Fischers Interview with the artists behind Tyneham House HERE
Back
in 2011 when I was tentatively looking for a second release for my
fledging record label, I stumbled upon a mysterious
MySpace page by a group called ‘Tyneham House’, the page was
decorated with artwork by Rena Gardiner (who was unknown to me at
that time) and the music was an other worldly mix of field
recordings, Mellotron and acoustic guitar. It turned out that
Tyneham was promised to Glen Johnson’s Second Language label, so I
offered to do the artwork, and in January 2012 the two labels
co-released it on tape and CD in a cardboard box with a handmade
booklet of my illustrations. In 2016 Clay Pipe reissued it on 10”
vinyl, in an edition of just 300, which has since become sort after. The new 2023 pressing is on blue and
transparent marbled vinyl, with reverse board cover and inner sleeve,
and the booklet of illustrations has been given a complete redesign.
Frances
Castle 2023
The
pastoral, wistful yet ineffably disquieting music of Tyneham
House
is made by artists who wish to remain anonymous here, save for their
eponymous title. The musicians are happy, however, to let it be known
that these recordings have been around for some years (many of them
complied from old cassettes) and that they take inspiration from the
1960s/’70s/’80s work of the Children’s Film Foundation – a
body who really ought to have made a film about this mysterious West
Country curio. At least now we have its endlessly poignant
soundtrack.
The
small village of Tyneham, on the beautiful Isle of Purbeck, in
Dorset, was once a thriving little community – that is until the
British Government requisitioned it for training manoeuvres and other
‘strategic purposes’ in the run up to WWII. This was supposed to
be a temporary measure, but the area remained in military possession
long after hostilities had ceased, causing distress among former
inhabitants, many of whom were farmed out to prefabs in nearby
Wareham and Swanage.
Tyneham
was characterised by its red telephone box, a tiny parade of shops –
Post Office Row – and a grand country pile which stood about half a
mile away from the village: Tyneham House. The army removed the
building’s oak panelling and ornate decorative details and promptly
set about using it for target practice. So great was the shame
expressed locally about the damage inflicted upon one of Dorset’s
grandest houses that the powers that be decided to grow a copse
around the remains of the structure to give the impression that it
was no longer there. Despite this, a substantial part of the
structure remains intact, including its Saxon hall.
Land
access around Tyneham was opened up in the 1970s, but admission to
the house remains strictly verboten. Those who’ve been found around
the premises, especially anyone wielding a camera, have felt the full
weight of military trespass law.Tyneham
today is regarded as a nature reserve by some – as a national
embarrassment by others. It’s still a political hot potato, in
Dorset at least.
Oliver Cherer is back with a
new Gilroy Mere record which follows on from his other
much
lauded Clay Pipe releases (The
Green Line, Adlestrop and
last year’s D Rothon collaboration, Estuary
English). Over the
last two decades Ollie has released numerous collections of music in
an ever shifting array of modes, from folktronic, singer-songwriter
styles through psychogeographic electronica to jazz-tinged,
confessional ghost-pop and most recently, the “guitar tainted
machine rock disco” of Aircooled.
Gilden
Gate is an
album of
two halves.
Side 1 ‘Rising’
celebrates the sun-drenched beaches, pastures and heaths of rural
Suffolk, whereas Side 2 ‘Falling’
explores the underwater world of the lost city
of Dunwich and its five church
spires.
Oliver
says:-
“A
few years ago I discovered the lost city of Dunwich. I’d made a
trip to Suffolk to shoot a short film about Sizewell Nuclear Power
Stations and stayed in the old Coastguard’s Cottage on Dunwich
Beach within sight of Minsmere Nature Reserve and the power plants.
It’s a wild, sleepy place of pines and heath and North Sea winds
and a strangely mysterious air – Sutton Hoo is
nearby
and Eno’s reference to the very beach that I was staying on made
perfect sense. In the small museum at Dunwich I learned that this
tiny hamlet had once been a major medieval city of international
trade. It seemed unlikely and even now, knowing Dunwich as a small
village, I find putting what I know about the place into perspective
as a city a certain kind of impossible.
It
seems that over a period under the influence of the weather, natural
erosion and market rivalry the thriving harbour port was inundated by
the North Sea and eventually slipped into and under it. The city of
churches was lost and all the spires engulfed and toppled. What
remains are the few houses, and the ruin of Greyfriars crumbling
inexorably down the cliff and exposing the bones of buried monks as
the graveyard follows the building’s stones into the sea.
There
are local legends surrounding the site including stories of fishermen
hearing the bells of lost churches and seeing the ghostly, lighted
city beneath their boats as they return to the shore.
Gilden
Gate is
named for one of the entrances to the old city and is a musical
meditation on Dunwich past and present. Frances Castle’s beautiful
sleeve art depicts the surface and the sub-marine, the warm and the
cold, the past and the present. The glass rises and the glass falls
and in the background there are sirens, fog horns, church bells and
Eno, and on the sea bed there are the scattered remains of a once
great city.”
Available at the same time is a
repress of Gilroy
Mere’s ever
popular second LP
Adlestrop. It wasoriginally
released in 2020 and is
inspired by the remains of the rural railway stations that were
closed in the wake of the 1963 Beeching Report.500 hand numbered copies with cutout paper station.Orginal release info HERE
