Brian Lavelle

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…

Well, I’m not, as a matter of fact, a cat but I have recently been reading a book with that title by the Japanese author, Natsume S?seki, written at the turn of the Twentieth Century.

Originally published in ten instalments in the literary magazine Hototogisu between 1905 and 1906, I Am a Cat is a satire on upper-middle-class Japanese society during the Meiji era, portrayed through the eyes of an “unloved, unwanted, wandering kitten”. And it’s very amusing in a wry, philosophical sort of way; easy to dip into and with a storyline that’s more a string of anecdotes and observations than a rigid narrative structure.

I’m enjoying it; the observations on the superiority of cats over humans are really quite droll, especially if you know even a little of how cats behave; and with it tonight I’m also enjoying some 2000 Long Yuan Hao Yi Wu Mountain raw puerh that I got as a sample from Yunnan Sourcing. Very nice indeed, and my first ever puerh: the smokiness, dried fruit aromas and lasting flavour are quite intense, and not what I was expecting at all.

Okay, so that’s Chinese tea, with a Japanese novel, itself translated into English: but it’s Thursday night and it’s been one of those weeks…