5 & 1

5 & 1

Discipline 4

Thanks to anyone at The Bunker Club on Friday. I had an awesome night, privileged to briefly hear J-Pop / Noise duo Umez, and witness the breaking of a Bass guitar - sliced off at the neck.

A new record is waiting for airing - I'm just waiting to finalise the artwork and work out what name it will be release under, it's all super-exciting stuff.

   

Up-to-date

So it looks all quiet on the musical front..... not so, oh no. A busy summer is putting back plans to release a second album of drone ever so slightly, but musically we are busier than ever. 

Last wednesday ushered in Gwdihw's first Anti-Folk 'takeover', headlined by the band I'm playing with Quiet Marauder. The brain-dead hoards were treated to wonderful twisted narratives and enthralled by tales of Vlad the Impaler, the zombie apocalypse and Alan Shearer (listen above). 

We're at The Moon Club, Cardiff on Monday, banging kettles, baking trays and numbing our frankly empty skulls in front of Belgian guests. 

The allure of performing with the combined genius of Simon Read and Jonathan Day in October will mean missing what is surely the greatest festival line-up the UK has seen this year; Supersonic in Birmingham. For three days Kevin Drumm, Tim Hecker, Merzbow, Six Organs of Admittance, The Bug and the cream of weird, esoteric artists and musicians, swarm upon England's second city and abuse thousands of ears with an intense, euphoric, racket. Visit the Supersonic website here and salivate in expectancy. 

Elsewhere, my housemate and I recently went to see local ancho-acid-punk legends Sicknote. Now despite having seen (and enjoyed) Sicknote before, Friday's performance opened my eyes to a revelation of possibilities for live performance and the potential of inviting a wider audience to laptop noise, through rhythm and theatrics.   

The band were excellent, previewing and releasing their forthcoming anti-conservative single 'Tory Swing', big-beats, a tonne of charisma and a certain Mr Cameron swinging urmmm rather precariously. 

It got us thinking about ways with which we could combine anarchy, noise, surrealism and a 'kick-you-in-the-cunt', live show.......... The result; seven days of programming and two nights drinking, preliminary plumbing shown below and you can expect some harsh beat driven noise in the next couple of months, like Cut Hands - but better. 

listen to Sicknote <---- here.

EPD Demo

New track-in-the-works "The Telephone Rings" available below...




The next album is coming along well, i'm deep into polishing the mixes, The Telephone Rings still requires a few alterations but the spine is largely there. Enjoy!

Album offer

As a pre-cursor to my forthcoming album, I have made Imber available for 'pay what you'd like'. Whether this be £0 - £100 all downloads are appreciated and contributions even more so.

DOWNLOAD HERE

The next record is slowly trundling along in the mixing stage, all tracks are complete and nearly ready for your burning ears.....

MicroBeer Festival

Yesterdays Quiet Marauder show...

Recording Drums

Michael Norris

Evening,

All studio-work has gone well, after a long and tiring (on the ears) session last night, I am currently taking a break from mixing.

Yesterday my friend (and housemate) came down to put guitar and violin on a few tracks, they are sounding positively apocalyptic - with more than a hint of 'New Age'. The record is already sounding more pastoral than the last and has a much greater emphasis on analogue sounds, which is defiantly a good move. I'm excited and looking forward to being able to share some of this with you.

Before I leave, to anyone creating ambient music, or mood music of any sort - I'd like to recommend Michael Norris' spectral plug-ins, I have been using some of these fairly heavily to blur sound-sources and generally make everything sound more 'ghostly',  Norris has a plethora of granulisers, filters, pitch-shifters, gates etc... all of them impressive, if that wasn't recommendation enough - the whole suite is free to download. Follow the link, enjoy.

Studio .1

Second Album Update

Good evening,

Exciting times ahead; a move to London looks imminent and the second album is in full swing. I will be locked in for a mammoth studio session next week and hope to share some sounds by the end of the summer.

Lately listening patterns have changed very slightly, an introduction to Stars of the Lid, has got me thinking about completely orchestrating a project in the future, while Black to Comm's Alphabet 1968 is back and freaking the shit out of my stereo. If you are not familiar with this album, I can thoroughly recommend listening to it in low lighting on high volume, it is the single most captivating and unsettling album I can remember listening to, though everything that Marc Richter (Black to Comm / Dekorder) touches falls just the right side of uneasy. Give it a listen. 

Broken Flag

Morning,

A quick update. Work is underway on a 'companion' album to Imber, it is sounding more pastoral than it's predecessor which is odd considering that recently my stereo has been occupied with Broken Flag: Retrospective 1982 - 1985, in homage to the 30 years of Broken Flag festival that took place last weekend in London.

Unfortunately I was unable to go to this event, which is sickening seen as I doubt we're likely to see anything similar again (at least not in a while), guess we'll have to wait for No Fun host a UK festival.

But on the plus side, it does mean that Second Layer have got their hands on the Ramleh CD box-set as well as the 1982 - 85 retrospective, I doubt they will be in-stock for too long.

2.1

Digital Copies Available...

My album, is now available to purchase in a digital format for the *cough* reasonable price of £5.... Stay tuned for an update regarding physical copies.

For the moment I am looking to book live dates around the UK, so if anyone can / would like to help, or perhaps know any promoters that may be interested, please get in touch.

Matthewpastkewicz@gmail.com


 

Imber

Evening, My first full album, Imber, is available to listen to on the player below (artwork temporary). So please, turn your lights low and speakers to eleven..

If you are interested in purchasing a copy digitally it will be available in the near future, stay tuned here for developments. If physical is your thing I will have a limited run of CD's - but you will have to wait.

Enjoy..........

New Music

Good evening and welcome to the life of a man with nothing better to do than construct unlistenable soundtracks of little to no interest. After months of studio work, I finally have something to share with you, so please; pick a track, press play, get back to whatever it was you were doing, and enjoy subliminally.

Let's Be Together

Studio Work

Prologue

Brian Eno’s assertion that ambient music can be “actively listened to with attention or as easily ignored, depending on the choice of the listener,” a music that, “exists of the cusp melody and texture,” could easily be applied to the work of Matthew Pastkewicz, only his ambient world is a vast stream of paranoia and unease.

Pastkewicz’s music feasts upon the tension of ambiguity and it’s terrifying manifestations, monolithic shelves of noise swept with nostalgia, chilling narratives with transient colour.

Actively listened to with attention, too hostile to ignore. A haunted dancehall punctuated with schizophrenic flashbacks.

By Timothy Hazel