Platonkin / Lauki / Newman

Apologies for no posts over the last 24 hours. Sometimes when the sun makes an appearance it’s time to just kick back and chill… Anyway here’s some interesting info on recent releases from the Audio Gourmet label that are well worth investigating…

Kirill Platonkin – Trails

Although Audio Gourmet is based in the relatively small isles of the United Kingdom, we like to think of ourselves as part of an international community. Our catalog has seen us release work from artists from all continents bar Africa so far! Yet it must be pointed out that with the rise of the internet, the geography of a record label is becoming increasingly irrelevant.

So onto our latest 15 minute EP from afar, we welcome Kirill Platonkin to the fold. Kirill is from a town called Blagoveshchensk in far Eastern Russia. It lies at the point of confluence of two rivers, Amur and Zeva. Kirill was born in 1986 and began writing music in 2002, centering his early work around psychedelic rock. With Pink Floyd a huge influence since before he can remember, Kirill progressed onto playing in a thrash metal group for a while before eventually moving on to experiment with sound by himself.

Through a couple of early pseudonyms such as Platon and GhostSonic and some releases under his belt, Kirill Platonkin became of age. He chose to drop his attempts at finding a name for his works and decided upon using his birthname for future output.
This has led to releases on labels such as Dark Winter, Treetrunk, Circlesandlines and his own Tukuringra netlabel.

Kirill’s sound falls loosely into the dark ambient category and is made up from field recordings and sounds he captures from his instrument collection which includes guitar, flutes and ethnic instruments.
Collecting instruments is very much an accompanying hobby for this artist and he is always searching for new objects to impact his music

For Audio Gourmet, Kirill has put together ‘Trails’, a three track EP of dense and brooding ambient music. Dark ambient music is a saturated sub-genre in which only a select band of artists are able to come up with something challenging and well put together. Kirill Platonkin is one of these artists, as you will soon hear for yourelf…

Lauki – 69º54´S-135º12´E

Next up on Audio Gourmet, we present an EP of five tracks by Spanish artist Lauki. He was born in Pamplona and lives in Barcelona where he currently works as freelance sound technician and composer.

Mikel Lauki has several other projects, including f.ex and Lupus where he blends ambient music and IDM. At the end of 2008 the netlabel 49manekinow published his album “Obertura”, a piece of sound experiments trapped within IDM, glitch and concrete music boundaries.
He is also part of the collective Sci-Phi, where he explores through different audiovisual pieces, the connection between image, sound and the sensibility of the time we live.

He has a particular weakness for contemporary classic music, generative art and the aesthetics of the digital error.
With the juxtaposition of classical music set to fractured digital manipulation, 69º54´S-135º12´E is characterised by crystalline nets of microsound, glitch and computer sounds that break upon contact with the delicately analog melancholy of rubbed strings.

The contrast of these two ingredients is stark, like ice melting in the hot summer sun. The ice is fragile and vulnerable, inevitably melting away quickly in the intensity of the heat. For this EP, the five short tracks reference this beautifully as the modern classical melodies are quickly melted into droplets by the electronic glitches, evaporating in just fifteen minutes.

Jacob Newman – Against A Quantized Sky

With ‘Against A Quantized Sky’, Colorado based artist Jacob Newman joins the Audio Gourmet Netlabel catalog. He has been in touch with the label back when it was first set up and has been slowly working on somthing for us ever since.

He began experimenting with sound back in 2004. Previous work includes releases on Earth Mantra, Seedsound and Data Obscura.

Jacob’s music particularly draws influence from the balance of analog versus digital and this latest EP is no exception. It is produced mostly using piano and bass, with digital and analog synthesizers used minimally.
It was the artist’s intention that the eventual sounds heard within this EP continue along a similar line of his previous work – to be contemplative, relaxing and to inspire slow thinking.
Against A Quantized Sky has been specifically designed to fit the Audio Gourmet brief of just fifteen minutes of sound and it is to offer the listener a short window in which to slow down and regenerate.

Thematically, the EP title came about after Jacob had taken the cover photograph and uploaded it to the internet. His friend Marcos made the comment ‘Against A Quantized Sky’ and Jacob felt it was fitting as the title for his latest EP. The rest is left for us as a listener to disect and to search for any hidden meaning within this delicate and meditative collection of sounds…

www.music.audiogourmet.co.uk