Colin Potter & Phil Mouldycliff - Drone Works #3 (Twenty Hertz, 2004)

1 Untitled 22:50

It must be a very fertile period for Colin Potter, judging from the recent cds on Twenty Hertz and the new Monos album which has just been released. This is an incredible ep in the ltd. "Drone works" cdr series, and probably my favourite one of the lot as of yet. I haven't listened to Potter's first collaborative work with Phil Mouldycliff ("Shellfish in kettleback", ICR 2003), so I wonder if it is similar to this little gem. This is a huge droning thing with dripping water recordings over some ominous rumblings and electronic reverberations. Powerful, trascendental and perfectly constructed. It sounds like a dark ambient version of Ora, or Lustmord revisiting the Deep Listening Band's "Troglodyte's Delight". What can I say? I still have to find a record involving Potter which is not great...
Chain Dlk Review by: Eugenio Maggi (aka Cría Cuervos)

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Colin Potter - Drone Works #2 (Twenty Hertz, 2004)

1 Untitled 23:45


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Nurse With Wound - Gulls Just Wanna Have Fun (ICR, 2005)

1 Untitled (0:59)
2 Untitled (15:58)
3 Untitled (1:08)
4 Untitled (0:56)
5 Untitled (9:34)
6 Untitled (0:40)
7 Untitled (0:55)
8 Untitled (14:49)
9 Untitled (2:20)
10 Untitled (14:20)
11 Untitled (15:00)
12 Untitled (3:14)

"Various Broadcasts and Audio Debris"
Available only with the first 250 copies of the Shipwreck Radio Volume Two.

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Ora - Rosea (Hic Sunt Leones, 1996)

1 Golden Hemisphere (12:37)
2 Sadness Of Beauty (11:11)
3 The Forgotten Well (10:38)
4 Rosea (8:49)
5 Flowers Of Tan (16:05)

The inscription for Ora's "Rosea" states that this music is "full of Elves and Gnomes" and those of you familiar with the little things in life that we here at Aquarius love, you know that gnomes and elves fit right in (last list's "Ancient Forest of Elves" anyone?). Although the notes on the back, provided by the ususally tight lipped recluses Andrew Chalk and Jonathan Coleclough, share none of the valuable insight into the music of gnome and elves that the inscription implied. Anyway, Ora is the textural drone collective that features Darren Tate, Lol Coxhill, Colin Potter (Nurse With Wound), as well as the aforementioned Chalk & Coleclough. This 94-95 record's loosely structured field recordings of geese and what Byram thinks sounds like someone rolling around on a couch with contact mics taped to their latex t-shirt coalesce into signature patterns of sound that fade in and out of delicate drones. Texturally, Ora has always been quite adventurous, and "Rosea" is no exception.
Aquarius Records

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Dada Lives - Footsteps Overhead (Nil, 2002)

1 Untitled (28:22)

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Ora - Final (ICR, 2002)

1 Distances (7:55)
2 New Movements In G (12:45)
3 Things Shall Fall (9:45)
4 Gamela (11:23)
5 Inkwell (8:30)
6 Abstraction (9:34)
7 Roses? (8:06)
8 Across (4:48)

Disque composé de morceaux rares et de trois inédits, devant au départ être un double album... les morceaux manquants formeront en fait After Rainfall... Drones à base de field recordings, d'effets électroniques divers, saxophone, flûtes, sitar, etc...

Many moons ago, Darren Tate and Andrew Chalk found their way to Colin Potter's IC Studios, where the three initiated the humble yet eccentric drone project Ora, with occasional help from the likes of Jonathan Coleclough, Daisuke Suzuki, MNortham, and Lol Coxhill. The majority of the Ora releases have been small editions of CD-Rs following in the tradition of the UK underground cassette culture, where artists would simply release things themselves whenever the albums were finished and without having to adhere to the timetable of a record label. The obvious disadvantage in Ora's case is that their limited nature discouraged many from ever discovering the beautiful sounds found on Ora's odd CD-Rs. Fortunately, Ora has compiled several anthologies from those CD-Rs, the first being the Streamline 2LP "Aureum" (which has unfortunately received the same fate of the CD-Rs and has gone out of print), and more recently, the "Final" CD released on Colin Potter's ICR label.
With Darren continuing on as Monos, Andrew working in Mirror, and Colin busy engineering / collaborating with Nurse With Wound, Current 93, Monos, and dozens of other projects, Ora has ceased to be, and "Final" is probably the last Ora document to be released. Culled mostly from the CD-Rs "Live," "Distances," and "New Movements In G," this anthology does also include a couple of unreleased tracks. As the more recent Monos and Mirror recordings reflect, Ora's specialty has been the construction of the opiated drone that implores a sort-of calmness but at the same time actively confronts the listener with its sound rather than floating to the back as aural wallpaper. Built from field recordings, bowed metals, and various electronics, Ora situates their drones within a wide spectrum of textures -- ranging from the sporadic use of angular blurts from Lol Coxhill's sax and accompanying dense scrapes like a huge boulder getting pushed across a concrete floor, to tiny fluctuations from flutes and sitars. "Final" stands as yet another exceptional record from this small aesthetic circle of UK drone artists.
Aquarius Records

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Ora - After Rainfall (Fungal / ICR, 2003)

1 Gnome Culture (9:14)
2 The Slope (12:24)
3 Darkness (11:35)
4 Attribution To Memory (12:52)
5 After Rainfall (21:25)

These are the Ora tracks that should have formed a double album with "Final" but were thought to be lost.
Thankfully, they were found.

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Monos - Sunny Day In Saginomiya (Edition ..., 2001)

1 Sunny Day (21:12)
2 October (24:38)

La base de ces deux longs morceaux sont des field recordings (un jardin japonais pour le premier, un hélicoptère et des moteurs pour le second) enregistrés par Daisuke Suzuki, retravaillés par Darren Tate et Colin Potter, qui y ajoutent une électronique vaporeuse...

Monos' music is elusive: if you don't pay enough attention, it blends into the background, becoming an unremarkable soundscape with strange sounds occasionally creeping in. But the moment you focus on it (or listen with headphones, strongly recommended) it becomes immersive and fascinating. Darren Tate and Colin Potter work with the threshold of audibility and familiarity, mixing together vaporous synth textures, field recordings, and electronics to create aural surrealism. Sunny Day in Saginomiya is more demanding than Nightfall Sunshine. The album consists of two extended tracks (over 20 minutes each). The title track is constructed over field recordings made by Daisuke Suzuki. The whole landscape (a Japanese garden, it seems) is clearly audible at first, but as the piece gains in density only the birds, some of them singing from frighteningly close range, signal that the field recording is still there. The other elements are woven into a shifting soundscape with no beginning or end. It is a beautiful experience. "October" adopts a very different perspective. In this piece, the sound of a helicopter provides the basso continuo, accompanied by motor hums and a barely audible synthesizer patch. On top of this basic layer are added odd, disgruntling sounds: a creaking floor, fart sounds in a metal pipe, and various other found sounds, all introduced carefully and purposefully placed into the composition, even though they are often loud, disturb the mood of the backbone layer, and alter -- even contradict -- the peacefulness of the first piece.
All Music Guide Review

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Monos - Generators (Die Stadt, 2005)

1-1 Sleep (23:07)
1-2 Generators (21:50)
1-3 Slowly Fading (26:25)
2-1 The Black Sea (48:01)
3-1 Generating A Black Sea (45:50)

Monos voit collaborer Darren Tate et Colin Potter. Le premier disque est essentiellement basé sur des field recordings, le second sur des sons électroniques, le troisième inclut des composantes de chacun des deux précédents pour donner quelque chose un nouveau résultat....

Monos is the collaborative project by Colin Potter and Darren Tate. This double album consists of two different works recorded between 2002-2003 at IC studio. Disc one features 3 tracks that are loosely based on processed field recordings in the ‘classic’ Monos style, exploring internal spaces. Disc two has one long track of organic and electronic tones which combine to give a dense cloud of flowing sound. Additionally there will be a special mail order only edition includes an extra CDR, containing a track made up of components from both discs, which produces a completely different result.
Intuitive Music

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