BANDCAMP REVIEWS:
This is such a great blend of old timey recordings, field recordings, haunting music and weirdness that I listened twice in a row and transformed into a lichen-rock-frog-dream.
Superb stuff full of dream like atmospheres, beautifully recorded and mixed together. Be patient with it as the record will eventually envelop your brain.
Ghosts roam just beneath the earth, and Amy Cutler has found them. In field recordings from “a naturally resonant mossy chasm,” manipulated chants, record crackle and assorted instrumentation, she plays close attention to the phantasmic shape of the land that was to make sense of what is. The results are doomy, witchy and full of shadows.
A glorious lo fi bedroom pop record, a duet with her own recordings made in decades past, filled with restless invention. The cassette-driven analog haze speeds up and slows down, often finding minor key crescendos, the small moments of perfect flow that punctuate a background of emotional deflations driven by climate change.
A dextrous tapestry woven from a range of – often eerie, always beautiful – atmospheres. Fluid, breathing, warped and entrancing – an emotive journey from one space to another, across melancholic landscapes.
Amy Cutler takes found sounds and musical compositions and turns them into pieces that are equally perplexing, mournful, and playful. Some of the most fascinating music I have heard all year.
Who could resist dancing in the acid rain while listening to this array of audio bonbons? If it is just on in the background while you are cleaning/changing the cat litter - you might be fooled into thinking you had a regular old radio station on - but then a closer listen opens your ears to the detuning and tempo shifting taking place that turns the "normal" into something a bit more "sick/wicked". Dig in and dance until your skin melts off!
Brilliant successor to the early work of Stephan Mathieu, featuring reworked pop tunes, backward hymnals, mixed up with badass field recordings. Punk acousmatics. Let's give a nod to the DJ.
MIXES:
Cutler curated a guest mix of ‘pink hauntologies’, titled “is this love or just a muzzy elevator from the future”, for More Realistic Goals on Reform Radio. The full mix and her accompanying blog is available here. More recently she curated a guest mix for The Wire’s Adventures in Sound and Music (8th Feb 2024) focused on mortality and solar decay, available on The Wire here and also with her expanded blog discussing the concepts here on Shane Woolman’s website.
MOST RECENT RELEASES:
Double track ‘everything in the wind of the sun / penumbra (our love will cover up the mountain)’, in group album Attention Moves (Selvage Flame, 2024). This compilation collects works made by poets who work with sound. Contributors were asked to respond to any or all of three poems taken from the ‘Tracking (notes)’ sequence in Tom Raworth’s 1973 book Act (see accompanying pdf of short contributor essays).
TAKE WARNING RAIN - rain dance redux for the Anthropocene (Human Geography Recordings, 2023). This 22-track album of rainy pathos and bathos is available digitally and/or as a pro-dubbed cassette in mud brown, with custom artwork by Cutler.
SISTER TIME (Strategic Tape Reserve, 2023). This 24-track album was selected for top-album-of-the-year lists in 2023 by The Wire magazine, by Bandcamp, and also topped the list by Tabs Out. SISTER TIME is a tape-work collaboration between Cutler now and herself as a child. All cassette samples are from mixtapes originally made by the artist in the late nineties on her first Hi-Fi. Between vaporwave and a child’s hyper-focus on a looped chorus, the album draws on growing up as a girl listening to a canon of male singers, bearing their souls against the ills of time.
It Is Only A Dream Of The Grass Blowing - single track in group album Look to Imber (Modern Aviation, 2022). Bringing together 12 musicians, this album is named after the ghost town of Imber, in Wiltshire, and is a speculative fieldtrip into loss and absence in the landscape.
the ends (also end) of (the) earth and variants (Crow Versus Crow, 2021). This 18-track album springs from a strange medieval English riddle, the Harley lyric Erthe toc of erthe (Ms. Harley 2553). The tiny lament or puzzle is impossible to translate, since in its four short lines the word earth appears twelve times. Like ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’, these identical words have different meanings – transitioning between soil, world, burial, cultivation, decay, earthly possessions, and our own bodies. This is an album of sonic variants, settings, and radio covers of erthe toc of erthe, including by invited guest artists and friends. The modified field recordings, chants, twilight hums, nonsense riddles and layered repetitions are each inspired by the variant meanings of ‘earth’, in the ultimate group sonic field trip. Sounds include: 78 rpm hiss, voice, guitar, field recording, kodak slide carousel, lullabies, dulcitone, and synth. Recordings made at Lud’s Chapel, a green mossy chasm or the ‘grene chapel of misfortune’.
Two tracks on enCoiled (Less Than One, 2021), a group album built using The Coil Reconstruction Kit.
GUTTER (Misophonia Records, 2021), a solo tape release made in London and Pendle Hill, inspired by histories of atmospheric experimentation (including Richard Towneley's 1661 Pendle Hill barometer experiments). Instruments on this album include: guitar, bass guitar, pedals, plucked psaltery, windscreen wiper, processed electronics, record hiss, VHS, field recordings, and home-made rain gauges. The tracks were all formulated in solo lockdown, in airless spaces, de-tuned landscapes, and walks alone in Lancashire.
‘Why is it already night?’, in Panic Grass and Feverfew, 2020, a Hiroshima anniversary group album compiled by Malady of Knots and Less Than Zero (December 2020). Please give any donations directly to Amnesty International.
‘The Many-Headed Moss’, in Remembrance For Lost Species 2020 (November 2020), curated by Bell Lungs and Laura Luna Castillo. All proceeds from album sales will be split between Umbral Axochiatl, an axolotl conservation charity in Xochimilco, Mexico City and Scottish Seabird Centre, a seabird conservation charity in North Berwick, Scotland. Cutler’s track is inspired by a specific ephemeral moss, Weissia multicapsularis (many-fruited beardless-moss). In 2001, the total world extent of this tiny-shooted moss was already less than 80 square cm, and its existence in odd centimetre patches in southern Britain has now declined from critically endangered to
questionable. Few living bryologists (moss experts) have ever seen this species, and even its online entries tend be on now-defunct global botany websites. Unlike the melancholy presence of a whale song in our imaginations, these tiny voices are easily lost, misplaced, or overlooked, even if we can choose to imagine the last colony perhaps surviving somewhere in a temporary state.
Forgerons et Alchimistes (Sonic Postcards), 2020, available as digital album or limited artist’s metallic silver print edition. Sonic postcards from fragile petromasculinity / a nine track score made while working on an experimental film about metallurgy and extraction. This album is inspired by Jane Bennett's writing on 'the life of metal' from the point of view of metal - 'a continuous melody of copper', or the unstable vitality of 'these filmy sheathes...like wisps of fog', as well as Mircea Eliade's work on the temporality of these 'celestial metals'. The sound worlds of the archive collide with lost choruses of metal fatigue and underwater sea change, as well as ideas of shift work, alloys, and singing 'in the round'.
‘Facts about chorus / voices joined together / voices which carry (us)’, REVEIL 2020: WAVE, for International Dawn Chorus Day, 03.05.2020. Listening in Common in Uncommon Times. For this edition of the Acoustic Commons Study Group by SoundTent, Cutler’s long sound piece considers the idea of tragic chorus and virtual chorus. While in previous years the group met on site to perform and respond to the dawn chorus, this year it included live sessions, discussion, phone-in, and audio/answer messages to the planet, on what it means to listen to morning moving across the planet as we stay in place.
‘the winter not quite flush in its frame’, The Hackompilation (Hackoustic’s fundraising album for Iklectik, released 20 March 2020). “From Dec 2019-Jan 2020 Cutler was on a winter residency on an isolated, uninhabited military fortress island in the Finnish archipelago, working alone on an experimental nature documentary about ice and extinction, whilst watching the political news coming in from the UK and the fires in Australia. In March 2020, during social distancing isolation in London, she began to combine her recordings from that residency (wind, torch crackles, rattling) with visuals and sounds which could be produced with materials during lock-in at home. Mimicking the “epic” sounds of nature cinema and expedition films, based on Romantic ideas of isolation and bleakness, this project is in fact entirely prosaic, and bleak in a different way. The pieces include samples from her reading during both periods – in the case of this track, Han Kang’s The White Book – and give a semi-fictional audio testimony, combining the more fairytale and the more unexpected realities of the start and end of the winter of 2019/2020.”
RADIO/ SOUND: as well as her live performances, including in her duos with Sylvia Hallett and with Delphine Dora, Amy’s sound work includes contributions to albums and radio shows, including live musical performances, as well as special episodes, discussions, or performances about ecology, geography, or public imaginations of nature. The most recently aired radio show was the third episode of Timothy Morton’s The End of the World Has Already Happened; this episode is called Cue the Sinister Music and explores creative and philosophical problems of extinction, on BBC R4 on 16th January 2020. The most recent releases are Amy’s track with Spaceship Mark for the double album Black Moon Waxing and Black Moon Waning from Sofia Records (“What parallels of sound connect time-specific recordings created beneath the same lunar influence? These two new compilations contain recordings all made beneath the BLACK MOON in August 2019”), and her contribution of a sonic reading of an asemic poetry score by Derek Beaulieu and Justin Katko, in this album by see monsd and Stuart Chalmers, BOTHBOTHBOTH, from Invisible City Records. Other recordings which are online include this podcast of the Sex and Nature artist-in-residency Q&A with Amy in Exeter, 2019; the Into the Forest: Late Junction live collaboration session (Amy Cutler, Lee Patterson, and the string trio Barrel), aired on BBC3 on 21st June 2018 and produced by Chris Elcombe for Reduced Listening, Oak: Natural Histories, aired on BBC4 on 26th Oct 2015, and Atomic Bark! Zombie Apocalypse Zeitgeist, aired on Resonance FM on 21st April 2011. She was also on Resonance FM, “causing a ruckus about pedagogical voices of nature”, on the live improvised music series The Ambrosia Rasputin Show (12-1.30pm, 29th July 2018), alongside Ivor Kallin and Sylvia Hallett; the 1.5 hour show is available online here on Mixcloud. Other live show recordings include the full set Live at the Cube (Bristol) with Delphine Dora (19th Oct 2018) and the demo The Bamboo Trap w/ Delphine Dora, Café Oto (17th Oct 2018), from the 2018 tour Oh What Monsters (top left).