Boomkat on Tape Music by Thomas Shrubsole

https://boomkat.com/products/tape-music

Here is their take on it:

Highly organic, kinetic concrete and reel-time ferric sculptures from Thomas Shrubsole, yielding almost 3 hours of lower case rustles resembling free jazz played by nature.
Working in a richly imaginative realm shared by everyone from Rashad Becker to Anne Guthrie, Ekoplekz to Decimus, ‘Tape Music’ is a significant batch of scrabbly abstraction from one of the North West’s most quietly unassuming and uncompromising operators. Working hands-on with his trusted reel-to-reel, found objects and 2nd-hand instrumentation, Shrubsole enacts a form of intimate animism that gives life to sounds lesser heard. Mixing skin with grit and machine, his improvised interventions coax out a plethora of almost anthropomorphic or bestial tones from things without a heart or brain, and effectively using his own body to better connect with the world around him and bring listeners to a granular, haptic level of musical perception.
Recorded in 2015 and left to mulch in the archive, the results are entirely analog from nose to tail, exploring a bio-organic feedback system that investigates, in his own words, “notions of the prosaic and the exotic, the personal as it pertains to the physically local and the distant, proximate and disembodied, the diaristic and the documentary: Kinetic performative physical improvisational concrete.”

Thomas Shrubsole - Tape Music / New on Parenthetical Activities

Please see http://parentheticalactivities.blogspot.com/2019/12/thomas-shrubsole-tape-music.html

A new double cassette box set with 48 page art booklet. Limited to 30 stamped and hand-numbered copies.

Available now.

Order by emailing.

Frans de Waard on Excavated Relics

SUB LOAM - EXCAVATED RELICS

Back in 2016, Thomas Shrubsole released 'The Portable archive' under his Sub Loam name (see Vital Weekly 1051), which was culled from material he already recorded in 2009 and 2010. It is something I enjoyed very much, as Sub Loam is something along the lines of lo-fi electronics, drones, ambience, and field recordings. Now there is a tape with "two recently rediscovered examples" from the same period, which Sub Loam feels they should be heard out there as well, and, sure, why not? This is something that could have also been surely been on the original release. On the first side, there is 'Soil Surface', a slow rhythm piece. Or perhaps something that is on a loop device but slowed down quite a bit. In sync we have a mild synth sound burping away. It is a very moody piece and almost a dub-like one at that; all bass but no dance riddim. This is a particularly great piece by Sub Loam. The B-side contains 'Stone Fragment', in which the guitar plays quite a big role, strummed in a really odd way, and set against a set of misty electronic backing, with an odd flanging effect on the strings. It seems like he's playing the guitar with a stick, creating odd timbres. Buried in the background there is a bit of percussion. It is a totally different kind of piece and a most enjoyable one at that as well. I sure can believe that if you found this after ten years you would want to release it. (FdW)

Review from Vital Weekly issue number 1208

Buy a copy by emailing direct or from Boomkat

New Release: Supplement to the Portable Archive - Sub Loam - Excavated Relics

 Supplement to the Portable Archive

Additional Items Received 2019

Two recently rediscovered examples of Anomalous Loam dating from c. 2009 - 2010 excavated and displayed on professional, high quality, real-time duplicated cassettes in a clear cassette case with printed j-card and cardboard outer slipcase.

Outliers from the early trilogy of Cotton Goods/Dissolving releases Ohr, 2 and Earthern Circle (2009 - 2010, as documented on The Portable Archive and digitally), these two tracks, around ten minutes each, are thematically and musically related whilst standing at a remove from the circle of those original releases. Four-track murk, hiss and delay, fragmentary percussives, guitar strings as contour lines and twisting stems, burgeoning organic clouds, analogue electronics, observation and contemplation.

The connections with the spiked rural wanderings of Earthern Circle, the heavy soil dubs of 2 and the radiant moods of Ohr are clear whilst also travelling outwards from those zones towards the territory where these two other, previously unreleased, distinct artefacts were discovered.

Two Archaic Remnants, excavated from magnetic tape 2018.

Released October 19, 2019

All instruments, music, recording, production, artwork etc. Sub Loam (Thomas Shrubsole) 

C22. 45 Copies only. 

Available to order directly.

Email Sub Loam or Dissolving Records 

Thomas Shrubsole - Themes and Variations (Parenthetical Activities)

Please note, a new album as Thomas Shrubsole on a new imprint. Coming later this month...

https://soundcloud.com/parentheticalactivities/thomas-shrubsole-themes-and-variations-album-previewl

The Portable Archive now available from Boomkat

Please note The Portable Archive has now sold out from Boomkat, the remaining few copies are available to order directly by emailing sub (dot) loam (at) yahoo (dot) co (dot) uk

https://boomkat.com/products/the-portable-archive

The Portable Archive reissues three volumes of Thomas Shrubsole’s humbly absorbing ambient studies/contemplations on soil dynamics, which were recorded as Sub Loam and originally released on the cult Cotton Goods label between 2009-2010, and are now teamed with an equivalent amount of unreleased pieces made over the same period. Big Recommendation if you followed the Cotton Goods label, or if you're into the ambient side of works by Move D, Jan Jelinek, To Rococo Rot etc.
First and foremost it’s lovely to be immersed back into the project, whose naturally textured and decaying structures emerged as quietly as they dissolved back at the turn of this decade, finding good company amidst the rustle and hum of Cotton Goods and, in a way, could be said to preempt the focus of FIS’ research in similar, if noisier, rugged terrain on his From Patterns to Details album.
No mistake, though; Sub Loam’s music is endearingly tactile and better defined by its textured, nuanced fidelity: Shrubsole handles his material like an environmental researcher or botanist making sketches on his rambles, offering poetic observations on the interactions of organic matter with “ditches, hedgerows, alleys, pavements and hill tops” modelled with an electro-acoustic palette and tape loops that quietly represent his subject’s subterranean root systems and intuitive sprawl in a series of concentric spirals and microtonal whorls.
Within his chloro-centric weltanschauung, Sub Loam divines the music of “rhythmic footfall, creeping rootstock, vaporous billows, transformational marginalia” in an esoteric yet tangible way that should sweetly resonate with anyone who appreciates the ebb and flow or warp and weft of nature on the smaller scales, as well as its larger form landscapes, and who can appreciate the same within the parameters of ambient music.
A beautiful package.

The Portable Archive - Limited Art Edition Box Set - Available to order

 

  SUB LOAM - THE PORTABLE ARCHIVE

Ohr, 2 and Earthern Circle Reissue + Bonus Material 3 x Cassette Art Edition Box Set

Available to Pre-order now, ships 21st September

Limited to 99 hand-numbered copies

 Each set comprises:

• 3x hand labelled music cassettes each wrapped in a different double sided A4 print. The cassettes contain almost 3 and a half hours of music, including full reissues of the albums Ohr, 2 and Earthern Circle and 80 minutes of previously unheard sketches and subsidiary material.
• 2 x A4 Art prints on recycled papers.
• 1 x double sided A5 Art print on recycled paper.
• 1 x double sided sheet of texts, including contemporaneous and newly written poems and texts and credits.
• 1 x 20 page card-covered saddle-stitched A5 book 'The Portable Archive - A Concrete Guide' including drawings, collages, archive photographs, subterrannean mythologies.
• Download code for high quality digital copy.
• All enclosed in an A5 kraft board presentation box secured with a printed belly band.

All prints are Riso-printed using soya-based ink.

All imagery, design, text, music etc. by Sub Loam and exclusive to this release.

Sub Loam presents an archaeological companion to the long-out of print debut trilogy of Cotton Goods and Dissolving releases. Originally released between summer 2009 and early autumn 2010 and sold out almost immediately this cycle of cassette based long-form soil-structures has now been compiled along with additional musical sketches and routes and packed into a hand-made box set complete with art prints, poems, texts and a 20 page concrete guidebook. 

 

From the paths and hedgerows, home-brewed radiophonic technique, bedroom visions knitted together with ruderal rudiments. From cassette loop foundations, technological mishaps, analogue concrete 4-track compost. Performed and mixed in live takes. Organically expanded syntheses, allusive and elusive, present and intimate.

Real-time two-track improvised dubwise mixdown: accidents and gentle spiraling, thoughtforms, inspiration and tracing of unfolding topographies as tape unspools past record heads versioned.

Holistic loop cycles, connected to physical processes and interface. Oscillation, breath, ebb and flow of voltage and time perception; rising, falling, stretching outwards. Echoes; Landscape; Vegetation.

Excavated and exhibited long form ambi-tonal poems, detourned old technologies, micro and macro focus, altered perspectives, an obscure world of leaves and oxide re-revealed. Heady visions of the ancient past and utopian futures flowering in the foliate present. An archaic botanical artefact.

The Portable Archive presents subtle but potent chlorocentric imaginational stimuli for listeners new to the recordings as well as those who have been following Sub Loam's output since these first flickering, green-toned landscape explorations and exploratory ambiences.

 "rhythmic footfall, creeping rootstock, vaporous billows, transformational marginalia."

Available to pre-order now, ships Autumn Equinox.

 The Portable Archive box set costs £25.00 per copy.

Postage & Packing is £3.80 in the UK, £6.00 in Europe, £8.25 for US, JP etc. and £9.00 for AUS and NZ tracked options are also available on request.

Direct orders and enquiries to: sub (dot) loam (at) yahoo (dot) co (dot) uk 

The Portable Archive - Sub Loam Re-issues

Sub Loam's first three releases Ohr, 2 and Earthern Circle, originally released on Cotton Goods and Dissolving, will be re-released soon as part of a retrospective set entitled The Portable Archive. Long unavailable these three re-issues will be be bundled with a further two full albums recorded during the same time period (2009 - 10) but never released before. For fans old and new of Sub Loam's herbal-toned landscape exploration and exploratory ambience this should provide an extensive sonic topography from familiar places half-remembered and hitherto unknown areas off the beaten track.

More details to come.

Keep your ears to the ground.

Plants Projected

'A Concise Dictionary of Plants and Their Uses' as reviewed by Stuart Marshall in The Sound Projector :

"Again and again I return to this intriguing mini CD from Sub Loam (i.e. saxophonist and SP reviewer Thomas Shrubsole), as if it would yield to me its mysteries, but alas! Swiftly am I ensnared and borne upon its pulsating airways, yet just as swiftly it’s over! Where fled those rogue minutes? In this wise, concise designates more than botanical taxonomy, though both here are central concerns: manifest in the splicing of Shrubsole’s pithy breath work and the bloom and swirl of spectral electronic backdrops. Most distinct is this in the first of the three untitled pieces: multiple rows of delicate, trowel-headed honks slowly summoning wispy, electroacoustic spirits, while at the same time suggesting an attitude of horticultural preparation that inspires me to chop carrots in concert. Tracks two and tree are (even) giddier: a tiny sax twittering like butterfly wings caught in swerving currents of pure colour; and finally a slow kaleidoscopic reimagining of all that has preceded. It’s an unearthing of unearthly sensations that could well uproot your mental stability. 39 further copies of the CDR are in existence, all of which are accompanied by a hand-numbered A4-sized abstract print by the artist."

You can read the original review on TSP website here:  http://www.thesoundprojector.com/2014/09/24/natural-kingdoms/

Pre-order 'The Unnoficial Countryside'

A 7 x 3" cdr boxset featuring a new twenty minute Sub Loam decomposition exploring familiar Sub Loam themes through trademark esoteric analogue techniques, approaches to audio-fidelity and texture.

Available for pre-order from Wednesday 24th of September here:

http://wistrec.com/the-unofficial-countryside/