{"title":"Low Company","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"breathing-under-honey","title":"Breathing Under Honey","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn addition to the unique musical proposals and the large body of work that they have developed separately, Amelia Cuni and Werner Durand have been performing together as a duo as well as in collaborations (Tonaliens, Born of Six) for more than 20 years. Fusing her Indian Raga singing in the Dhrupad style with his minimalist and experimental approach, they have expanded the reach of their soundworlds as well as proposed new paths for contemporary music. On this occasion, Uli Hohmann joins them in a range of hand drums from the Middle East and North Africa, plus a dulcimer-sounding hammered guitar. Durand's various self-made wind instruments, soprano sax, and blown kalimba shine along with Cuni's astounding vocals, which are sometimes sung through a mirliton (a medieval type of kazoo). Clearing is the trio's first published recording. Seconds of Thirst, recorded in one session at Uli´s studio in Bavaria in early 2014, is truly a conjuring where distinctive balances come to gather. A deep drone unfolds patiently in a hypnotic manner, comprised by Werner's characteristic PVC clarinets, a hammered guitar played by Hohmann, and subtle electronic tones. Above all, Amelia's singing voice, filtered through the mirliton, drifts buzzing along the gradually shifting harmonic waves, meandering through serpentine melodic lines and microtonality. In the middle pieces, vocals turn into an ethereal multi-layered chorus, an exotic and astonishing instrument pulsing delicate and vaporously, like a gliding silk sail without a mast to bind it. Misty ambiances linger on as the soft atmosphere disperses the weight of undelivered syllables. Just intonation aligns the pan-ney's winds with vocal navigation. Foe to scattering, hurry, and affectation, Clearing's pace has lifted a fog translucent enough to reveal treetops calmly appearing, efficiently condensing damp into definite drops that fall drumming, forecasting what's yonder. With a condensing sound going from Buddhist morning chants down to Indian festive traditional music, the title track, which closes the album, is the most vibrant of all, permeating a bit of commotion through buzzing drones and galloping percussion. Without disorder, yet without measure. Clearing is therefore this shuttle into the distance, this space that weaves, unites, and tenses the different cords that we are made up of.When the clouds advance silently, gray, until they become dark in a few minutes, it means that the monsoon is coming. It reaches us without apparent noise, but then resounds in its images, leaving behind lightness, freshness, clarity, and a tremendous 6 luminosity that comes from so far away: from the Himalayas, from so ancient, from Sanskrit, from a sound where the darkness and the divine, where the concrete and the landscape, where the rock and the humidity leave a mark that brings together and ties a sky loaded with new clouds.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Low Company","offers":[{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":50405586174283,"sku":"2164083","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/Static_Cleaner_Lost_Reward_-_LOW16_-_Breathing_Under_Ho_a32ec721_thumbnail_4.jpg?v=1726579550"},{"product_id":"red-ribbon","title":"Red Ribbon","description":"\u003cp\u003eLow Company presents Yuta Matsumura’s \u003ci\u003eRed Ribbon\u003c\/i\u003e, a sequence of introspective, lavishly melodic dream-songs and amphibian atmospheres recorded in scattered periods over 2018-21. Having played in bands like Low Life, M.O.B. and Orion, and the duo Jay \u0026amp; Yuta (with Jay Cruikshank), \u003ci\u003eRed Ribbon\u003c\/i\u003e is Matsumura’s first solo outing, and represents a conscious effort to move away from guitar-based songwriting. He composed its nine tracks mostly on piano - layering vocals, bass, keyboards, flute (courtesy of Maeve Parker), violin\/cello (Laurence Quinn) and clacking drumbox rhythms into dynamic, dubwise avant-pop structures which are supple and spacious but fizzing with detail and vivid inner life. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe laconic 4\/4 pulse, heat-warped synth-tones and haunting vaporous melodica of opener ‘Box Garden’ set the tone: its surreal psychedelic patternings barely concealing a deep sting of longing and regret. The cryptic lyrics suggest chance encounters, hidden logic, missed opportunities, fatalism, serendipity. A city submerged: everyone else paused mid-movement, while you’re allowed to swim free and fish-like through the streets, over the rooftops...‘Tangled Orchid’ is a tense night-drive through dry desert heat and into the unknown, running away from your old life, chased down by dust-devils of half-baked schemes and abandoned plans, while ‘Myth Machine’ drops the tempo and something mind-altering, guiding us on a tripped-out dubdisco scuba among alien flora and fauna, a world of impossible shapes and sensations. At which point, the mood of the album decisively shifts, firstly with ‘Sake No Otoh’, sung in Japanese by Haruka Sato: an instant-classic, breathtakingly intimate lover's lament that sounds like it got lost on its way to heaven and is now doomed to orbit the earth forever. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe songs that follow continue in this more confessional, imploring mode. As if the travelling's done, the baggage has been cast off, and we’ve arrived at our destination, where the real process of rebirth and repair can begin. The music’s textures become less overtly dubby and electronic, with more of an organic, earthy, chamber-pop\/avant-folk feel, at once sad and hopeful-sounding. Three songs in particular bear the influence of Eno’s 70s work (and its mutant bedsit offspring Lifetones, Flaming Tunes, etc): ‘‘E. Potential’, where baroquely chorused vocals - half-agonised, half-beatific - teeter on top of simple oscillating piano loops, and the stately, dawntreading ballads ‘Tabula Rasa’ and ‘No Sleep For Birds’. The bulk of the album was made prior to lockdowns and all of that; its themes of reset, self-examination, the need to f**k it all off and take spiritual stock, are timeless. Though they perhaps have a more bittersweet resonance now the world has returned 4 pretty much to how it was, only worse.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Low Company","offers":[{"title":"Black | LP","offer_id":50451151192395,"sku":"1162739","price":19.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/d0e58c21-4a83-4d95-ae68-dd798d273596_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727118554"},{"product_id":"world-wide-world","title":"World Wide World","description":"\u003cp\u003eSwelling and smearing the vision of 2018’s skeletal rock’n’roll heartbreaker\u003ci\u003e Baby\u003c\/i\u003e, most of the songs here are ballads – minimalist, ultra-hypnotic but lavishly melodic space-punk lullabies and bright, bruised expressions of jingle-jangle mourning. Highs, lows and heavenly blows. BW’s guitar is, more than ever, a thing of fearsome and filigree beauty, moving effortlessly from misty, mellifluous DIY pop-dreams to wailing vertiginous whiplash leads and dazed, epiphanic, angels-wept metha-drone, ringing in infinity - and tethered to this earth only by his beloved monotone, numbed-out, serial-killer croon. Spinning in its own orbit, but with recognisable dabs - perhaps - of Phantom Payn \/ JG39, Les Rallizes Denudes, Gary War, Peter Gutteridge’s Pure...and of course Bobby’s own work in Heavy Metal and Itchy Bugger. \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Low Company","offers":[{"title":"LP","offer_id":50504971714891,"sku":"1112989","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/1ece6162-2f43-4283-90b9-2f95c3bdab9b_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727812032"},{"product_id":"convalescence","title":"Convalescence","description":"\u003cp\u003eJust another album by The Doozer. One concerned with illness (no, not that one) and recovery. Inside to outside. Darkness into light. A way through the woods. \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eThe Doozer aka Simon Loynes is now seven LPs into a subterranean solo voyage begun in 2007, and to those of us who have followed it, the songs that make up \u003ci\u003eConvalescence\u003c\/i\u003e could be seen to embody a kind of late style - ultra-lucid, pared-down, precise; seemingly simple in form, richly complex in effect.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Low Company","offers":[{"title":"Black | LP","offer_id":50505041084747,"sku":"1140261","price":19.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/6a1b4e77-3a0d-477c-83ef-620ed3e23e34_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727812610"}],"url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/collections\/low-company.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}