Reviews for recent Notice Recordings releases

Some reviews for our recently released tapes. All tapes are still available, but we’ll soon be running out. See Notice Recordings’ shop or Bandcamp to purchase and listen to streaming audio.

Jack Harris & Samuel Rodgers – Primary / Unit 11
Vital Weekly (Frans de Waard)
Just Outside (Brian Olewnick)
Miguel Isaza / Infinite Grain
Paul Margee / We Need No Swords

Chik White – Jaw Works & Behind a Dead Tree on the Shore
Vital Weekly (Frans de Waard)
The Cookshop (Doru Mihail)
Pierre Cécile / Le son du grisli
Raymond Cummings / Cassette Gods
Paul Margee / We Need No Swords

Ben Owen – Birds and Water, 4
Vital Weekly (Frans de Waard)
Just Outside (Brian Olewnick)
Le Son du Grisli (Guillaume Belhomme) (See Travis Bird’s translation here.)
Infinite Grain (Miguel A. García)
Garrison Heck / Cassette Gods
Paul Margee / We Need No Swords

Haptic – Excess of Vision: Unreleased Recordings, 2005-2014
Vital Weekly (Frans de Waard)
Just Outside (Brian Olewnick)
Bill Meyer / Dusted Magazine
Paul Margee / We Need No Swords

HDR Summer

I recently discovered the HDR setting (a very rudimentary version of real HDR) on the camera app of my (non-phone) iPhone, and have been playing with its unpredictability. Apparently it takes multiple images simultaneously with different exposures and juxtaposes them together in order to arrive at the “best” exposure. It also seems to make things extremely and artificially sharp. This generally results in a bleached-out, highly textured image. I also noticed some very slight double exposed portions of the photographs, especially evident along contours and thin lines. I realized soon that this was because if the camera moves at all while the picture is being taken (processed), the different versions (exposures) of the photo are set into the frame at different points within the composition. But because this is HDR, nothing is blurry. So some sections are a bit off-set, and slightly translucent. Therefore, significantly moving the camera while taking a photograph results in some very strange ghost-like versions of various sections of the image. Lens flares are also accentuated, which I like quite a lot.

That said, I find that this shoddy iPhone version of HDR produces photographs which strongly portray exaggerated, dream-like aspects of the summeror at least ones with which I’ve been interested over the yearssuch as shimmering foliage, sun-bleached vegetation, the pressing, omnipresence of light and the heat it produces, strong contrasts of dark shadows on white-out dirt roads and certainly images that conjure sounds of birdsong choruses and the massed aural punctuations of insect noise. A lot of this imagery is due in part to my memories of summers as a child in Vermont, my fondness of de Chirico paintings and the descriptions of the beach in Camus’ The Stranger.