SOUNDWAVE : 96 : HARROLD ROELAND

Today’s guest deejay is Harrold Roeland.

Harrold was our guest deejay back in December 2020. His mix spanned the gamut from Biosphere to John Coltrane. It was so gorgeous that I asked him if he would be so kind to grace us with another one. Today’s show is equally breath taking and the range is just as broad and unexpected yet some somehow manages to be cohesive.

Harrold is a trained composer, a poet, sound designer and performing musician, specializing in the use of environmental sounds and long attention spans. His works try to invoke the timelessness of the world and its landscapes. He sings medieval and renaissance music with Ensemble Vlechtwerk, and hosts the radio show Sensenta, a musical serial, at the Concertzender every Sunday evening that explores many of these themes.

Oh, and Harrold also shares his daily haiku+picture on Instagram, which you can experience here.

Special thanks again to Kirk Markarian of Neuro… No Neuro who introduced me to Harrold (listen to Kirk’s mix for SOUNDWAVE here).

Harrold has some words about today’s show below.

Join us next week when our guest deejay will be Robert Koch.

See you then.

Harrold Roeland

A slightly moody mix. I couldn’t help but point to the current affairs in Afghanistan, which are much on my mind, as is the death of Raymond Murray Schafer. Such an admirable composer and thinker, such a loss for the music world. So there’s a reference to today in the description. I don’t mind if that has lost its urgency by the time this mix sees the light of day, but just so you know it’s there. The soundscape weeps today.

Toby Wren is an Australian guitarist who has an album called The Carnatic Jazz Experiment. As the title implies, it heavily uses Southern Indian Carnatic Rhythms. I think he’s a genius and this album deserves to be much more widely heard than it is now. The album is strictly acoustic, so the electronic echoes added in the end are my own, better to segue into the next track.

Lotto are from Poland, a band playing very minimalistic Post-Rock. Drones with drums. Once, for Sensenta, my weekly radio show at the Concertzender, I needed a variation on one of their tracks we played the week before. That’s the one you hear, the original but with little echo’s and delays added. I think it makes the track more hypnotic than it already is, and hope they will forgive me for messing around with their work. Both the original and this version appeared on Sensenta, and you can find their original version on their excellent album Elite Feline. If you like this music, check out their album VV too. It’s a gem.

To add some depth, Lull fades into the background around the 18 minute mark. Low frequencies galore. Though used for effect and drowned out here, Mick Harris’s album, Like A Slow River, is a beauty when it comes to dark, noisy ambient. Music like a haunted transistor radio.

Kloob hails from Spain. Synthesizer-based ambient is what he’s good at, and he seems to be getting better at it each year. This is an oldie, from his album Deep Emotional Phases, a remix found on the album as a bonus track.

Martin Stürtzer is next. I ran into his work through the Concertzender. A synthesizer wizard from Germany, he knows just how to twiddle those knobs and connect those modules to make splendid colourful textures. This is one of his more minimalist works, taken from, at the time of writing, a brand new album.

Martin Stültzer’s track turns out to combine well with another new work: Loscil’s “Lux”, from the album Clara. I mixed the two together on the radio the day prior to making this mix, and thought that move deserved repeating here. Loscil joins the mix from Canada. Pure blissful ambient.

Sedibus are The Orb’s Alex Paterson, and former Orb member Tony Falconer. Tony was around for the acclaimed album Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld. These two men meeting again in the studio, decades later, was the birth of a marvelous album. Classic Orb stuff, but from 2021.

And on to the final track.

The time of writing is 15 august 2021. In the wonderful country of Afghanistan the situation seems to be going completely down the drain. The news is worrying and hard to drive out of one’s mind. Thinking about what could happen to innocent people, especially girls and women, is enough to give you a knot in your stomach. Anouar Brahem’s work Improbable Day feels right. He is a famous Ud player from Tunesia. During the Arab Spring, he was home and couldn’t believe what was happening around him. He then wrote a full album about that. His opening track is our closing track for this mix. Yes, the context is much different than that of Afghanistan, but the music is fit for an Improbable Day.

Toby Wren “Prologue”

Lotto “Pointing to a Marvel (Sensenta edit)”

Lull “Treeless Grounds”

Kloob “Duran Vasquez”

Martin Stürtzer “Energy Scale”

Loscil “Lux”

Sedibus “Papillons”

Anouar Brahem “Improbable Day”

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