Brian Lavelle » www.brianlavelle.org

My latest album, Ustrina, has just been released by Andrea Marutti of Afe Records in Italy. It’s a limited edition of 100 copies in a beautiful full colour photographic sleeve. My thanks to Andrea for the release and for doing such a fantastic job with the sleeve.

I also have copies available myself for anyone who is interested. Get in touch if you’d like one.

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Press release:

Ustrina consists of a single long-form work entitled ‘Pyre Nullity’, which is a set of dense, shifting cloudscapes, perhaps a little darker in focus than Lavelle’s last few releases and certainly his longest single composition to date. Its layers of ghostly, distant voices, subterranean drones and processed field recordings evoke forgotten realms, but this is not dark ambient music. Its compositional approach, subject matter and photographic imagery all point to hidden places, memories from a Golden Age cast on the fire, but not necessarily the darker side of existence. Indeed the cover suggests a possible modus operandi: cross the bridge, open the gate, move within.

The album utilises compositional ideas which date back to the mid 1990s, but which were not realised until very recently. Within the layers of ‘Pyre Nullity’ are electronic passages from certain recordings over a decade old, previously unreleased and now reworked, rejuvenated and redefined.

There’s a positive little review of The Petrified Forest in this week’s edition of Vital (issue 631), which had this to say:

Brian Lavelle recently surprised us [with] ‘Supernaturalist’, and the two pieces here were recorded just before that and show the best side of his: manipulating field recordings and very much altering them into microscopic detailed pieces of ambient drones. Slowly changing patterns of what seems to be rain fall, deep bass sounds in ‘The Wood Turned Dark And Silent’ and more synthetic in ‘This Twisting Glade’, which sounds like a church organ being dissected. Very nice. (FdW)

Thank you Frans!

I’m pleased to say that Supernaturalist has now been released by wonderful Belgian label, EE Tapes. I have some copies for sale, if you’re interested, and have also put a fairly rudimentary order page on the site for this and other releases.

I’m very happy with how this CD has turned out, and whilst for cost issues the colour photographic cover which I had originally designed didn’t quite make it to the final release, it’s still a beautiful object and Eriek van Havere has done me proud.

Vital had this to say of it:
There was a time when Brian Lavelle was more active than he is these days. In fact I can’t remember putting on a CD by him in quite some time. Perhaps it’s wrong, but I always lumped Lavelle in with “one of the laptop guys”, but listening to ‘Supernatural’ I think this might not be the right approach. Lavelle uses electronics, field recordings, synthesizer, piano and bass guitar for four lengthy cuts of ambient music. Surely there is some sort of sound processing going which one could classify as ‘laptop’ inspired, but that is only really a small part of Lavelle’s music. Take one of the longest pieces here, ‘Citadel’, which has a firm cemented foundation of drone synthesizers and (perhaps processed) piano arpeggio on top. Field recordings - wind perhaps - take care of the rest. Much more ambient than glitchy microsound. On ‘The Bright Day Is Done’ bird twitter take care of that. Lavelle cleverly avoids the path in the forest that says ‘new age’ and follows the path that says ‘dark ambient’ - it also a path that can be easily found in the forest of all mood music, but its dimly light course is one that we follow much more readily than the lighter and brighter (and duller) new age one. Slow music, out of time, beyond space, simply floating weightless around. Great, maybe not so surprising, ambient music. Perfect rainy day music; start at twilight preferably. (FdW)

So there you have it…