It's quite rare to find releases whose concept cannot be thought totally new, but sounding so carefully assembled that are still appreciable in the field of organic and aural ambient. This collaborative project named Listening Mirror, founded by Jeff Stonehouse and Kate Tustain, manages to reach that goal by a selection, wisely titled "Resting In Aspic", from some of their most intriguing recordings, mainly issued on out of sale EP, digital postcards or samplers of DIY labels such as Audio Gourmet, Rural Colours, Heat Death and Hibernate, by a thorough operation of extraction and filtration of what could be considered objectively beautiful from daily din which normally drills our ears. The listener could reckon a certain unutterable cathartic property while listening Listening Mirror's calliphonies, either when they insert simple piano melodies and other unobtrusive instrumental spell (like in "Falling Under" or "Outside Heaven"), field recordings grabbed from natural settings (it's really absorbing the swarming pond life portrayed in "The Leechpool" or the astonishingly moody lagoon scape of "Venice Boxhead") and social life of playing children (such as in "The Organist" or "Wet Roads", whose ethereal combination with searphical choirs and samples which visually recall a sort of liquefaction process of the air could remind some works by Robert Rich) or when they offer pure drones (like in the entrancing "Without Saying Goodbye", one of the highlight of this selection). This aspic sounds apt for intimate catharsis or sonic prophylaxis.

The Michael Vlatkovich Ensemblio is an eleven piece orchestra with Vlatkovich at the helm on trombone, and is comprised of noted musicians Harry Scorzo (violin); Jeff Kaiser (trumpet); Brian Walsh (clarinet); Jonathan Golove (cello); William Roper (tuba, euphonium, cimbasso); Wayne Peet (keyboard); Anders Swanson (bass); Tom McNalley (guitar); Mark Burdon (percussion); and Ellington Peet (cymbal).

'An Autobiography of a Pronoun' is a rather peculiar work, but certainly one full of interesting and provocative ideas in the realm of fringe jazz. Opening track 'leg belly kill climb unaware pride' begins with a melancholy string duet by Scorzo and Golove and some incidental bellish percussion but soon morphs an uptempo jazzy Argentinean tango and salsa-mambo mashup. Melodically though it's almost anything but that- much more adventurous like Zappa's experimentation in his exploration of extended themes. Thereafter it's a fantasia of improvisation with Scorzo initially leading the way as other instruments riff off the trails he leaves in their wake. Nearly everyone gets in on the improv act and though it sometimes threatens to go off the edge, somehow it all manages to coalesce, even when it gets so far afield from the original motif. Zappa would mostly likely have written out all parts but the major solos; I doubt these guys had much of a score to work from except for the basic ideas.

Imagine a semi-drunken jazz ensemble from the 20's playing in a Parisian cafe for Dali, Breton, Artaud and Magritte and you may have some idea of what the next track, 'more grey than white, more old than young' sounds like. It's free jazz but out of another age. Swanson's busy bass solo at the end of the track sounds like he's not even of this world. The 'jmz' suite in the middle of the album has distinctly different sections. The first rather slow and somber and string-based. The second uptempo and jazzy led by horn at first with Peet's keyboard taking over for awhile and Burdon dancing all over the drums at first; more constrained as the piece progresses. It's a playful adventure that melts into its inevitable conclusion. The third section is mostly chordal ensemble playing between the horns sans percussion and bass, and I could easily see this piece being used as music for a seriocomic silent movie.

'little rubber arrow and elephant sandwich' may sound like a Captain Beefheat song title (maybe even Zappa) but in actuality it sounds like one of the most adventurous tangos I've ever heard. This is the tightest playing so far. Angular, halting meloies abound. 'explain again why I can't drive faster than the car in front of me' (great title!) begins in sort of a big band swing mode but soon transits into a bopish extravaganza, but never loses its cool. 'queen dynamo' features some incredibly tight playing and instrumental interplay even when it moves into free jazz terrain, yet ultimately never loses sight of its main theme. I love when it switches gears and temporarily moves into low down cool jazz. Sweet! Final piece 'memories hold my hand' with its melodic chordal horn ensemble is the most sentimental track on the album, a fitting downtempo close to this work. 'An Autobiography of a Pronoun' won't tickle everybody's fancy, and if you don't particularly care for jazz this recording is unlikely to sway your conviction. However, as a quirky and skillful merger of traditional jazz with free and avant-garde stylings, the Michael Vlatkovich Ensemblio has recorded a work that is both delightful and thought provoking with top-notch performances all around. You can't ask for much more than that.

According to the one-sheet accompanying this CD, 'Ivory' is the third solo record from Vienna-based 'soundworker' Peter Kutin. This is an ambient album, and Mr. Kutin derives his sounds primarily from guitar-triggered electronics real-time through a laptop. On a few tracks other instruments were used such as viola, Korg synth, and double-bass, the latter played by Mattija Shellander. Apparently 'Ivory' came about while Kutin was writing music for old silent movies for the Austrian film archive, though the music on 'Ivory' bears little resemblance to preconceived notions about silent film music, or at least none that I've heard.

There is a delicacy and quietude on 'Ivory' that is a result of very subtle sound manipulation on Kutin's part. Much of the music is comprised of multi-textured long dronish ambiences that morph and swirl but guitar (processed in various ways) also plays a major role in the soundscapes. You can recognize it ¾ of the way though the opening track 'Elsewhere' in a melodic riff using tremolo and other processing. Or, on second track 'White Desert' with a base of sustained very low tones swathed in reverb and bits of echoed picking.

'World Without End' employs is sizzling yet subtle melodic short loop as a basis for much of the piece while other electronic elements such as bass rumblings and airy and angelic electronics play off of it. Fragile ringing guitar strings are a major component of 'After the Plague' along with the sound of water rushing, lazy sustained tones, bass drone, and other incidentals. 'Storb' features gauzy guitar harmonics over a bass drone background. At about the 2:15 mark in 'Sombre' a loop sample of some classical sounding strings emerges from the bassy ambient gloom like the ghost of an old victrola. You can also hear field recording of a barking dog, children's voices, chirping birds, etc. Later in the piece this is replaced by water sounds, then some subtle fragments of piano-like melodies, undoubtedly guitar-based as it morphs into processed guitar sounds.

I can't emphasize enough how subtle the sound of 'Ivory' is; you may not notice anything at all until past the 2 minute mark on the final track, 'Lonesome Monster'. The muted taps, filmy drones, wispy tones and sparkling electronics may seem like they're hardly even there, but that's the point. Kutin's world of 'Ivory' is an elegant exercise in the sublime, and even the thunderstorm that breaks the tranquility at the end of the recording is but a gentle rain washing the slate clean.

ESMA is Eugenio Squarcia, a young Italian musician of less than thirty years, who lives and works in the city of Ferrara. Despite his young age he has behind him a vast work of sonic production. More than 20 self-produced disks which many are digitally availables into his bandcamp's website online store.

This last work by ESMA, titled "the Lost Atoms", however is also the first of his records to have a physical form, as it is printed and distributed by a new Italian independent label with a real strange name: "la cantina appena sotto la vita" (in english: "the winery just below the waist"). A new label that looks carefully at various kind of borderline productions. The same label, for example, has produced the debut work of another interesting Italian group, the "Margaret Lee", who despite being far away from the electronic sounds with his record the "Ballad of Beelzebub" is just outside the schematism of many rockbands, not only italians.

This album follows, after only a month, another equally interesting work by ESMA. A mini concept album called "The Archive - Soundscape from the exhibition" that is also the soundtrack composed for an installation whit artworks of the visual artist Marie Josee Cornello. The previous work of ESMA, which I highly recommend, is a good example of best synthetic atmospheres for a dark ambient of minimal electronic, that certainly would not mind at Brian Eno's fans. Among them there is surely also our ESMA because, as he says, Eno is one of its main figures of inspiration and education into the way to a personal search for a new electronic sound.

If the previous album is the dark and concise side of ESMA, this work "the lost atoms" is perhaps its most practical, conceptual and cultured component. 13 tracks with a frequent presence of abstract piano melodies who appears, sometimes, really suffered. That in some places they also underline a poignant and growing to emphasize a crescendo for a construction of an ambient tissue, rhythmic and poetic. Many songs, as we see clearly that the presentation of his work gives us ESMA, which suggest a conceptual influence arising from the literary works of William Butler Yeats. Some tracks like "No place for love and dream at all" or "the Shell" are filled with a rarefied and esoteric mystical influence that becomes the instrument of a simple sound, a sound born dark and deep but able to assume a new form of sonic beauty for his death and rebirth. So you would expect to see sprout the down from behind the "obscured clouds". clouds obscured by the darkness of night, a new dawn full of gold. A Dawn of gold rises, from behind the clouds obscured by the darkness of the night.

Into one of best tracks of this work, the mellow "Xibalba", also the title become a prelude for an explicit reference to the poetic vision of an ajar door on the afterlife underworld. The same vision narrated by the myths of the Popol Vuh. In other passages, such as the beautiful "White Road" or "Approaching the pneumatic void" we find instead musical glitch sounds and new forms of sonic minimalism able to regain possession of the noise and the sound. The young son ESMA, in most passages of his electronic songs like these, we instinctively returns the weight of an idea. Perhaps the same idea that our founding fathers, as John Cage or Steve Reich, had around the breathing sound of music.

The ESMA's music is, for this reason, electronic music for the mind, which borders on research and experimentation that most cultured. But it is also the music of sound more alive within us all, that vibrates to the rhythm of the heart and breathing. A music to listen on headphones, at high volume, while it's raining outside.
A music to let us listen, rapt, the last void spaces of this time in which we live. A time walking, with us and beside us, "obscured by clouds" above a weeping piano

This bridge built between two labels on the opposite sides of Atlantic ocean (Sebastian's London-based Robot Elephant and Ben's Oakland-based Tundra Dubs), which shares similar policies and do-it-yourself ethics, seems to rest on that phenomenon known as "witch house" or "drag", a bizarre name coined by Pictureplane referred to a sort of homemade music with references to occultism, whose main influences are a number of industrial and goth bands, but which is normally intertwined with a plenty of styles. This compilation has been splitted in two and includes many interesting declensions of "witch house": the most interesting stuff of the first half, the one which has been filled with Robot Elephant's trumpets, are related to forthcoming releases of the label, in particular Romanian HipDieBattery's "Bones", which sounds recorded during a Sabbath whose partakers put good dub and techno recipes together with dragon's claws and dwarf's guts in the cauldron, and Ourobonic Plague's "The Outer Alphabet", whose obscure nuances and ill-hop phat bumping could let imagine some devilish creature's foghorn possessed a mic to climb hip-hop charts, but also The Church of Synth's "Geh Ins Licht" dubstep imbued with Eurotrance typical trumpets is quite nice, while the most remarkable episodes on the second half are the ones by Funerals, a husband/wife duo from Columbus (Ohio), whose gloomy atmospheres could recall some shadowy trip-hop songs and the anxiety of musical acts such as Tricky's "Pre-Millenium Tension", Mascara's assemblage on "Sonnambula", which looks like a melting pot of elements taken from Sabres Of Paradise, Militia and G.O.L. and sticky minimal dubtech in "Korby Bryers" by Grimm Soundsystem, a freak by Tundra Dubs' owner itself.