Los Angeles-based Ryan Connor aka Sublamp has been releasing records since 2007 on Serac (USA), Pehr (USA), SEM (France), Dragon’s Eye Recordings (USA), Friendly Virus (Portugal), Ahora Eterno (Argentina) and Hibernate Recordings (UK).
“In Our Hidding Voice” is his sixth release which displays drones and heavy and saturated guitar and other elements.
Different layers of dense and abrasive noises create a dark atmosphere of isolationism, a perfect soundtrack for spectral and hazy landscapes.
‘We Sleep in a Room-Shaped Hole’ craft in the very deep soul of the track, a hidden melody that unfolds a subtle shape of beauty.
“String Trails” moves into a more ambient composition while “Corner Ghost” shows a granular texture that draws a different picture in the album.
‘Cut a Door Where the Walls Meet’ with its unsteady resonance puts tension and balance to the celestial drones of ‘Hiding Song’, the last cut of the album. Delicate!
- Loop
Sublamp’s ‘In Our Hiding Voice’ occupies a desolate nether zone between doom metal, ambient/noise and drone. In the company of Hibernate records’ roster it strikes us as one of their darker releases. From isolationist opener ‘Understairs’, the low frequency rumble and viscous haar of ‘Dear Carpetfoot’ looms into view, perhaps sharing a kindred, blackened soul with Danny Saul’s ‘Kinison - Goldthwait’ album, while ‘We Sleep In A Room-Shaped Hole’ masterfully holds us in suspense with glowering post-industrial drones akin to the work of Lustmord. The grainy friction and shadowy serendipity of ‘Corner Ghost’ sounds like a paranormal EVP recording, something perhaps also hinted at in ‘Girl, Calling To An Empty House’ whereas ‘the penultimate track ‘Cut A Door Where The Walls Meet’ is more concerned with creating a furrow of subbass oscillations gradually smudged with the hum and buzz of raw, droning electricity.
- Boomkat
Using only guitars and saturation devices, all run back and forth between tube amps and a broken reel-to-reel, Los Angeles-based Ryan Connor aka Sublamp presents ten heavily textured tracks, conjuring up dark atmospheres, inspired in part from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker and its desolated industrial foggy landscapes.
Assembled from cut-up drones and amplified guitar noises, In Our Hiding Voice strikes immediately by its visceral quality and dark edges. Surfaces are raw and abrasive but upon closer examination display mesmerising minute details that invite to listen those heavy soundscapes more attentively. With dense layers of reverberated sonic haze, We Sleep in a Room-Shaped Hole displays a vertiginous depth that develops even further as the track progresses, showing Connor’s understated talent for crafting complex arrangements and creating very unusual spaces.
On first listen of this record, the atmosphere seems almost suffocating and foreboding but, with time, tracks like String Trails or Girl, Calling to an Empty House assume a more immersive character and give an interesting perspective to the album. One standout track is Corner Ghost where Connor eschews his trademark saturated looped guitar drones and goes for different textures and colours, lighter and brighter in a way but making this short piece menacing and sombre – a welcome exploration towards altogether different territories.
One of the highlights of this unusual and really excellent record is probably the wonderfully titled Cut a Door Where the Walls Meet. Connor here gathers momentum and goes for a long stroll between light and shadow. The sculptural work at play is phenomenal and gives a real thickness to the music.
With In Our hiding Voice, Hibernate adds a very different album to its catalogue, giving people who follow the label very interesting new directions to explore. But, Ryan Connor’s work is above all a superb study on abrasive yet immersive shapes and structures. Highly recommended.
“Too noisy to be ambient, and too static to be noise. Drone seems like a pretty apt description, yeah drone is good enough. Drone Noise perhaps? No, sounds a bit too pretentious. Who cares about genres or tags anyway? This is good music and that’s all that should count”…
That was my stream of thought during almost every listen of Ryan Connor’s (Sublamp) new album and Hibernate’s first release of the new year. In Our Hiding Voice continues to build on the sound established by the label in almost all of its releases, that sense of disturbing quietude that thrives on elevating the audience’s sense of tension. Another common factor amongst most of their releases is that underlying sense of discovery of new terrain or emotion. Marta Mist’s Distance/Skeletal/Union and Clem Leek’s Holly Lane are two prime examples of such. Marta Mist continuously unleashed their music, element by element, in controlled fashion until they set everything alight and lifted the fog from all surrounding it to give us a finale of grand proportions, whereas Clem Leek rocked the listener back and forth between the mysterious, the tense and the outright beautiful.
Sublamp’s approach, however, is a bit different. Classical instruments make no appearance at any point during the record and the sounds are all manipulations of guitar noises passed through a tube amp. This creates a very thick layer of sound, one that is as harsh as it is abrasive, a continuum of evolving noise so to speak. The album begs to be played at higher volumes so as to appreciate it to the fullest and to avoid losing track of the finer details buried beneath the blanket of woven static that remains throughout the ten tracks comprising In Our Hiding Voice.
The first album that comes to mind on listening to this is Bass Communion’s Molotov and Haze, but on further listens Lustmord’s darker albums become another obvious benchmark to compare this album to. But where these two artists succeed in combining various elements and arranging them in a manner that keeps the listener enticed as the album moves on is where the biggest weakness of Sublamp’s effort lies. Some points in the album seem like they expose the artist’s loss of new ideas or inability to build on the successes of the previous tracks. Such is the case with “Corner ghost” and “Tunnels” whose placement in the order of things makes very little sense and brings the experience of listening to the album down quite a bit, the drones are quite repetitive and even on multiple listens very few surprises or memorable parts appear until they fade away,
Track length also seems to have a direct effect on the quality of the tracks in the album. Connor seems to be much more at ease in crafting longer tracks than shorter ones. Penultimate track “Cut a Door Where the Walls Meet” as well as the finale “Hiding Song” are the only two crossing the five minute mark on the album and they are those who portray Sublamp at his best. The space he gives himself on these tracks allows him to expand on the sound, create a world out of thin air and in a way pass that feeling of being stalked and attempting to hide that the album is based upon to the listener. Even his abilities as a producer are much more apparent on these two tracks than the shorter ones. The reverbed soundscapes lurking below the waves of guitar noise in “Hiding Song” are perfectly executed and the turbulence of “Cut a Door…” is probably the highlight of the whole experience.
At this point in time, Connor seems like he’s still in the process of honing and improving his skills both as a writer and a producer, and if these last two tracks are anything to go by, then probably his next release would be something that better shows his full potential. Just a bit of expansion on each song’s narrative would do a world of difference.
Another excellent new release from Hibernate Recordings. Sublamp is Ryan Connor, a sound and video artist, who’s released some excellent work through Ahora Eterno, SEM, Dragon’s Eye, Friendly Virus, Pehr and Serac. According to Hibernate, ‘In Our Hiding Voice’ is “centered around the kind of listening one might engage in whilst hiding from something or someone, perhaps hiding in empty buildings, underground tunnels or dark rooms in abandoned houses…” That makes sense, because most of the pieces here involve half-heard details wrapped in warm, scuffed drones and crackles that might come from fluffy gramophone needles, faulty air-conditioning, the wind, underground water – you get the idea. At one point I was sharply and uncomfortably reminded of a childhood experience of being under general anaesthetic. It’s an immersive experience, and not an altogether comfortable one at times, but the music demands attention and concentration, and the shortness of the tracks means that none of them outstays its welcome or outlives the usefulness of its primary motif. Recommended.
The timbre of the sounds within In Our Hiding Voice are relatively unusual and what may well be mistaken as analogue synthesizers or computer algorithms are in fact several hours of electric guitar recordings painstakingly melded into a collage of sound. Nurturing the elements which musicians often avoid, such as hiss, static and feedback hum, Connor even employs a reel-to-reel tape recorder with a deliberately damaged record head, for the purpose of creating his beautifully marred audio. The effort and time expended by Connor is not in vain and one is made aware of both the remarkable density within the ten tracks which comprise this album and also of their originality.
Opening with the dark and immersive Understairs, the album then descends into a dystopian world marked by dirges and clashes of distorted sound. The tracks are quite short and so pass quickly and noisily, with hints of melody beneath the surface occasionally coming to the fore. Though In Our Hiding Voices is perhaps a more challenging listen than much of the music released on Hibernate recently, it is all the more rewarding for it.
When you really listen to this album a second or third time you get so much more out of it. At first I thought it was just going to be an album of industrial noise, but it really goes much deeper than that and has a peculiar narrative that only becomes apparent with close listening. I was also surprised to find that the album has no synthesiser input whatsoever given that all of the sounds are typical of these instruments. In fact the majority of the sounds derive from Electric Guitar run through a Fender tube amp, recorded to tape, looped and passed through an amp again!
This is a fascinating album which is likely to remain one of the most unusual experimental works of the year. It will have you hitting the play button many times over as you explore the complex textures of this unusual sonic territory.
Wednesday Feb 2 12:00amWhen Brian Eno invented the ideas of Ambient music (by its very nature, no one could honestly lay claim to inventing Ambient music itself), the key factors were that it could be ignored by the listener, or completely blend into its environment, without losing any of its value. Indeed, for Eno, it was value added if the music did achieve these feats. Of course, there are very obvious pitfalls for a genre thus defined, and all manner of new-age, or thoughtless, or just straight bland dross has been passed as Ambience in the proceeding decades. Sublamp, thankfully, avoids these problems and has offered here, on his new album Shiverland, a peaceful, yet texturally complex wash of sound. Ostensibly a drone based work, Shiverland gives many signposts to its inspiration in the track titles. Pieces such as ‘Lichen Song’, ‘Airsnowtree’, ‘Mountainhead’ and ‘Glimmerspeed’ are indicative, though not merely descriptive. There is a wintryness to the mild distortions fed through cavernous reverbs, though fine details – tape hiss, warm static bursts or machine whirls – sit in the immediate soundspace, not the far-off distance, giving contrasting contextual depth to the spacial elements. Nothing is allowed to drift aimlessly. There is a continual development of ideas and sonorities within each piece and the relatively short track lengths for this type of music assist Sublamp in keeping things sharp and focused. So, while the overall drone-like aesthetic may initially have you thinking this could just be background noise, it is difficult to disengage and treat the music as merely a wash, the details continually drag you back to attention. Indeed, in the end it’s debatable whether this is actually Ambient, by Eno’s definition. Yes, we’ve heard processed drones from Tim Hecker and Fennesz and the likes, but Sublamp has things of his own to add to the aesthetic, which he presents here in an engaging and enjoyable album.
- Cyclic Defrost
After a spate of unseasonably temperate weather here in Boston, the mercury’s finally dipped below freezing and it’s snowing like the dickens — so now is an appropriate time to listen to Shiverland. The album is by a Los Angeles-based musician named Ryan Connor, and, in spite of its title, it is not what one would typically describe as cold. Like Montreal drone artist, Tim Hecker, Connor blankets drifting melodies and pulsating drones in layer upon layer of static and off-white noise that is warm, enveloping, and also rather disquieting. As a rule, Connor’s music is less abrasive and dramatic than Hecker’s. It unfolds and intensifies gradually, as Connor seems focused on creating a distinct, subtly charged atmosphere within each piece. It’s quite lovely, if disquieting listen.
- Rare Frequency
As soon as I heard those whirling, saturated droning layers of sound on the first track new ears new eyes, I knew that Shiverland was a release that couldn’t be ignored. Ryan Connor joins the ranks of an increasing number of sound artists whose compositions are clearly influenced/motivated by the artist’s deep-rooted connection to nature be it topography, climate, life forms, or a combination thereof. Track titles such as Lichenstone, Animalface, Mountainhead, and Airsnowtree attest to this. The eight works comprising Shiverland take the listener deep into the territory of heavily textured ambient drones. This is not the ambient that Brian Eno wrote about in the sense of being background music that can be ignored. Shiverland demands the listener’s attention. Each piece is made up of layers of thick drones, white noise, passing melodies, and the cozy hiss of static which are begging to be culled out and heard. With so many rich details of sound rising above the droning base, there’s too much going on to for the music to be ignorable. Pervasive, warm, harmonious, and robust are good descriptors of the general ambiance here. Artists who music is aesthetically similar to Sublamp would include Tim Hecker and Michael Trommer (Sans Soleil). Even though from the title I expected something chilly and maybe a little uncomfortable, Shiverland is quite the contrary. Listening to it is more like basking in the rays of an early summer sun and being enveloped by the soothing warmth. Those beautiful drones bring about a relaxed mood while the richly textured details caress you and keep your attention.
- EARLabs
Los Angeles-based Ryan Connor was born in a family of scientists, growing up in environments such as national parks and rocky mountains. This helped him in developing a keen ear in conjunction with the (unfortunately rarely met nowadays) awareness of being a scarcely significant component in the cosmic order of things, which on the one hand limits the typical human tendency to unwarranted egocentrism, and on the other renders the ability of discerning the inner qualities of sounds more enhanced than the norm. The nine tracks of this very nice CD show exactly that, mixing unconscious responsiveness and concentration in static soundscapes among the most satisfying I’ve stumbled upon recently, gifted with unpretentiousness and a wealth of harmonic textures despite the almost complete lack of movement or dynamic shifts. Connor used field recordings and regular instruments to expand the borders of his and our perception, which he seems to achieve without excessive effort. Scenarios that unfold consecutively and naturally, like the succession of nights and days. Obvious, and yet surprising, as the changes in the weather: beautiful to observe and, especially, listen to.
– Temporary Fault
Sezionare le parole per mettere a nudo i fonemi in esse contenuti è un po’ come svelare quei dettagli nascosti nella intrinseca proprietà timbrica di strumenti e attrezzi acustici, per poi manovrare il tutto a piacimento. È quello che fa Ryan Connor, in arte Sublamp, nel trattare il suono armonico alla stregua di un’emotiva forma di comunicazione pre-verbale. In soldoni si tratta di processare il materiale prodotto da chitarra, violino, lastre di metallo, registrazioni sul campo etc. in maniera estenuante, letteralmente di sfibrarlo e deteriorarlo, ridurlo a poco più di ciò che si percepisce come un frullio d’ali o un disorientato gracidio ambient. Operazione nella quale il trentenne autore americano si fa apprezzare per concisione e chiarezza d’idee.
– Blow Up Magazine
Sublamp is Ryan Connor, an LA-based musician whose ‘Breathletters’ attempts to explore, through the electronic processing of various instruments and sources, the concept of sound as a pre-language form of communication. Thus Connor treats guitars, violin, glockenspiel and electric bass in a ‘pre-musical’ manner, allowing tones and extra-musical sounds to gently, haphazardly unfold, arranging them subsequently into pleasant digital streams and pairing them with abstract field recordings. It sits comfortably on Yann Novak’s Dragon’s Eye Recordings label alongside artists Celer and Son of Rose, and is firmly part of the growing field of post clicks n’ cuts producers mixing acoustic sound sources with digital frippery.
The crunch of what sounds like snow underfoot in ‘Echolalic’ is an evocative introduction, and the warm yet creepy subterranean rumblings on ‘Dust Lessons’ recalls Eno’s ‘On Land’, but much of ‘Breathletters’ fails to make an impression. That of course could be the point: the album’s 39 minutes drift effortlessly by, and the lack of demands placed on the listener is often just what’s wanted.
– Cyclic Defrost Magazine
That Los Angeles-based Ryan Connor was raised by scientist parents in national park and rocky mountain settings might begin to explain why his Sublamp material exudes such textural richness. Electronically expanding upon the timbral characteristics of acoustic instruments such as glockenspiel, guitar, violin, electric bass, and hammered metal, the thirty-nine-minute Breathletters weaves nine settings into a tapestry of hypnotic ambiance. Fleshing out the material with field recordings, Connor allows each placid setting to gently flower and then slowly decay as it flows into the one following. The pieces are detailed, meditative drone settings of shape-shifting character, with clearly discernible contrasts emerging as each one appears. In some settings, instruments lose their identifying character—the metallic rivulets that make up “Monophoneme,” for example, are presumably guitar-generated but the sound is abstracted just enough that another instrument could very well be the source—whereas in others the natural sonorities of a particular instrument are audible; in “Like Spiders on the Fox’s Tongue,” for instance, a violin can clearly be heard sawing over an otherwise dense mass. Breathletters impresses as refined on both compositional and production grounds, a quality immediately evident in the opening piece, “Echolalic,” where a meditative gamelan setting is formed from soft percussive rustlings, glimmering bell tones, and faint bass pulses. Elsewhere, industrial reverberations give “Dust Lessons” a metallic character, while the breath-like wheeze of organ tones dominates “Mouseblood.” Another of the album’s strengths is its concision, with the tracks feeling like complete statements despite the fact that they’re no more than three to five minutes in length.
– Textura
Growing up in various national park in the US, Ryan Connor (1979) got an interest in growth & decay and the cognitive abilities & instinct of animals. For his music as Sublamp this interest is used as source of inspiration. Sound as a non-verbal communication source exploring the emotional reactions it provokes.
Breathletters, released on Los Angeles based Dragon’s Eye Recordings, is an exploration into the world of communication by sound without language. Several acoustic instruments are used as source for sound arrangements. In the process binaural field recordings are added to finally result in nine pieces of music.
The pieces fit in well with the tradition of micromusic and minimal music as we know from artists such as Taylor Deupree and Streinbrüchel. Specially the composition and sound color do remind on the last one. Carefully chosen sounds are combined to form emotional droning sounds. In the short pieces (the cd counts just over 39 minutes) the changes are slow. They grow through into the composition and slowly decay again after a short life span. When listened to this music on headphones the binaural recordings add a fine depth to the music making it an experience as if you are in the middle of it. This extra dimension improves the listening experience and giving that little bit extra.
Due to the diverse use of instruments every piece shows its own identity, resulting to a fine album which is not completely new but created with care for detail. I guess that for the fans of micromusic this is an album worth the check out. It’s a welcome addition to the collection.
– Earlabs
Sublamp brings us Breathletters, 9 compositions over two thirds of an hour worth of harmonic and abstract sounds to explore a new form of communication, emotional or ethereal if you will. And in the soundscapes carefully composed out of integral details of acoustic instruments like glockenspiel, organs, guitars, strings and other devices and field recordings, Ryan Connor adeptly puts the listener in a state where you witness traces of this metalanguage of emotion – socalled breathletters that manifest themselves before you without ever becoming tangible. The soundscapes of Sublamp take on both intimate hues and more abstract, hollow characteristics and through growth and decay come in and out of focus. Sometimes one feels like observing something grandiose in the distance without really closing in, yet other times the slow growth rises and you succumb to the monster wave of sound in which details are very evident as the tonal curves reach their momentary peaks.
– Soundscaping
Sublamp’s Breathletters is an extraordinarily beautiful album. Using the idea of the hidden phonemes within organic instruments it sets about expanding on the tones and timbres of the chosen sound sources (glockenspiel, guitar, violin, bowed electric bass and various contact mic recordings) by bringing to the fore the exquisite and sometimes unearthly sounds within. The recordings are structured into nine tracks and, completely contrary to what you might think from the basic idea, it’s simply an album of gorgeous melodic content and wonderfully engaging arrangements. You’ll find yourself hypnotized by the attention to detail in the work with the deepest of textures locking horns with the lightest of tones. It’s a fluid album with subtle changes of atmosphere and mood than range from airy, spacious and gentle through to more robust, lightly drone-based tracks. Add a variety of field recordings into the mix and you end up with a naturalistic and eminently listenable album that’s up there at the top of my list of superb works this year. Dragon’s Eye is on a definite roll at the moment with releases from Clinker, Celer, Jamie Drouin and Lissom. Add Sublamp to that list immediately because this really is a brilliant album and comes highly recommended.
– Smallfish
Sublamp aka Ryan Connor explores the hidden melodies and textures of a set of acoustic instruments [glockenspiel, guitar, violin, bowed electric bass, contact mics on bowed and hammered metal. Furthermore field recordings shape the environmental surroundings of these quiet pieces. This Los Angeles based artist creates a deeply listening that shape expansive landscapes.
– Loop
Los Angelos-based sound artist Ryan Connor uses the Sublamp monikor to craft an airy pastiche of glacially evolving soundscapes in his recent release Breathletters. He presents these conceptual sound works as unwinding sculptural elements, abstract in form, yet suggesting natural, environmental processes. Connor juxtaposes binaural field recordings with recorded acoustic string instruments (violin, guitar, bowed electric bass) and hammered metals via contact mics. His focus is on distilling specific harmonics from dense textures, while allowing the pieces to remain sonically blurred and soft around the edges.
The 9-track limted cdr sets off with the song Echolalic, where foot steps morph into a lovely loop of repeating texture and metallic resonances. Dust Lession fades in slow and remains a distant quiet roar. The majority of the album has a somber tone with quirky track titles such as Mouseblood, Like Spiders on the Fox’s Tongue, and Spitting color. Stars of the Lid are an obvious reference when describing the general mood of Sublamp, however I think Sublamp achieves more with less pomp.
The press sheet references Connor’s interest in”pre-language” and “consciousness without language,” concepts like the instincts of animals. The aptly titled Monophoneme„ explores what might be a simple human vocalisation inside an ambient drone, but it is difficult to discern whether you’re listening to a voice or just layers of harmonic textures. Without the context, the piece stands well alone as an intriguing work but upon repeated listens more elements start to surface. Breathletters has many of these moments, which allow ever more discoveries upon repeated listening.
– Furthernoise
