all artwork is hand stamped / handmade,
all cassettes dub'd real time, high quality.
all cassette editions are limited to 50 copies.
downloads (320 kbps) will stay up until i see fit.
Cassettes £5.50 (UK) / £6 (Europe) / £6.25 (Rest of the World) all prices include postage,
or all 3 for £15 (UK) / £16 (Europe) / £17 (Rest of world) inc. postage.
please email me before making payment - johnny_scarr@hotmail.com
payment via paypal or cheque. all payments in british pounds (GBP £).
cheers, johnny.
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Burd & Scarr - Mantile #012 (C30)
**********SOLD OUT**********Comprising of a selection of studio sessions recorded throughout December 2008, Mantile #12 presents the culmination of two-years spent by Burd & Scarr playing improvised music together. It is a thought-provoking event in so-called sound art, intermingling and exploring two notions at once separate and related: the constructed soundworld and the latent voice of emotive popular music.
Blade Runner provides an audio-visual life-model from which Burd & Scarr sketch out their own soundworlds. Whilst ‘songs’ in the movie soundtrack remain extradiegetic parcels that support the narrative, compositions on Mantile #12 are an approach towards a more fully-integrated, dynamic and independent soundworld.
As such it is a fascinating inversion of an often-repeated process of using the ‘real’ (environmental sound recordings) as the basis for composition – a process in which we depart from the ‘real’, leaving the world in ever-softer relief.
By starting with an overtly fictional world, it would be tempting to say that Burd & Scarr are in search of the ‘real’ amongst the mythic, future-historical and utopian voices of the movie. Where though will they find it if the world of Blade Runner is not populated by real people or even fixed fictions? Instead, what Burd & Scarr have produced in this recording is a kind of gorgeous sound-map to the world of Blade Runner.
In a French film called Le Concert de Mozart protagonists variously speak of a clarinet accompanied by orchestra: “It tells about someone who is in love, and his grief at not being able to love… It is telling its stories, the clarinet is telling its own stories… These are operas without words, they say what the words don’t say.”
In another vein of sound on Mantile #12, Burd & Scarr have extracted single notes or chords from undisclosed ‘emotive’ popular songs. Isolated from their context, these little envelopes of sentiment are subjected to various forms of manipulation to open up and form the very substance of the composition. It is a kind of forensic approach where the artists cut in closely and present what they have found.
What they found, it seems, is grief and unrequited love. Burd & Scarr’s compositions dissolve the voice of ‘emotive’ popular songs into murmuring and mournful laments. To paraphrase one of the men in the French film, they have become “operas without words, they say what the words don’t say.” - Jonathan P Watts, Norfolk, 2009
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Johnny Scarr - (re)muxcuth - Mantile #013 (C20)
**********SOLD OUT***********
So say we buy into the Ballardian idea (though I’m sure he wasn’t the progenitor) of the temporal collective unconscious, the rising out of the night, structures and environments that predate our bones and relate to parts of our biological and social genealogy. Well, certain soundscapes attempt to uncover this forgotten past and strike out in the dark discord through ‘musical’ echolocation and when they hit something, it sends out white reverberations around the structure and the shape of some colossal construction looms out of the pitch-black. Think not to the ear of traditional composition; think to the bat and its sonar capabilities, the mammal creating a mental picture of the surrounding landscape by means of dissonant frequencies. Imagine the bat's ear picking up the skeletons of ancient, long-dismantled structures and you're there.
This particular abnormality has the hum of a colossal factory, a warped relic from the industrial age. Somehow in its phonic recreation, in its looking backwards through time, the events are rewound and flow backwards, the sounds are somehow unmade and become underworldly. They contain that specific horror evoked on looking upon yesterday’s ruins where the rats decay with the framework (B, 8:10) and at night, the ghosts of the machines still boom, hum and generate a cold heat; the haunting splashes of the previous inhabitants walking through the oily puddles tickle the ear (A, 5:00) and quieten to the roar of the siren and the cobwebbed common-room radio. The echoed reverberations of clanging metal send the night birds; the last fragment of life in the factory, madly fluttering and melting into the sky. - Jack Andrew Lenton
download: http://www.mediafire.com/?77lm2ba5id228bp
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Fossils / Spoils & Relics - Split - Mantile #014 (C30)
Blade Runner provides an audio-visual life-model from which Burd & Scarr sketch out their own soundworlds. Whilst ‘songs’ in the movie soundtrack remain extradiegetic parcels that support the narrative, compositions on Mantile #12 are an approach towards a more fully-integrated, dynamic and independent soundworld.
As such it is a fascinating inversion of an often-repeated process of using the ‘real’ (environmental sound recordings) as the basis for composition – a process in which we depart from the ‘real’, leaving the world in ever-softer relief.
By starting with an overtly fictional world, it would be tempting to say that Burd & Scarr are in search of the ‘real’ amongst the mythic, future-historical and utopian voices of the movie. Where though will they find it if the world of Blade Runner is not populated by real people or even fixed fictions? Instead, what Burd & Scarr have produced in this recording is a kind of gorgeous sound-map to the world of Blade Runner.
In a French film called Le Concert de Mozart protagonists variously speak of a clarinet accompanied by orchestra: “It tells about someone who is in love, and his grief at not being able to love… It is telling its stories, the clarinet is telling its own stories… These are operas without words, they say what the words don’t say.”
In another vein of sound on Mantile #12, Burd & Scarr have extracted single notes or chords from undisclosed ‘emotive’ popular songs. Isolated from their context, these little envelopes of sentiment are subjected to various forms of manipulation to open up and form the very substance of the composition. It is a kind of forensic approach where the artists cut in closely and present what they have found.
What they found, it seems, is grief and unrequited love. Burd & Scarr’s compositions dissolve the voice of ‘emotive’ popular songs into murmuring and mournful laments. To paraphrase one of the men in the French film, they have become “operas without words, they say what the words don’t say.” - Jonathan P Watts, Norfolk, 2009
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Johnny Scarr - (re)muxcuth - Mantile #013 (C20)
**********SOLD OUT***********
So say we buy into the Ballardian idea (though I’m sure he wasn’t the progenitor) of the temporal collective unconscious, the rising out of the night, structures and environments that predate our bones and relate to parts of our biological and social genealogy. Well, certain soundscapes attempt to uncover this forgotten past and strike out in the dark discord through ‘musical’ echolocation and when they hit something, it sends out white reverberations around the structure and the shape of some colossal construction looms out of the pitch-black. Think not to the ear of traditional composition; think to the bat and its sonar capabilities, the mammal creating a mental picture of the surrounding landscape by means of dissonant frequencies. Imagine the bat's ear picking up the skeletons of ancient, long-dismantled structures and you're there.
This particular abnormality has the hum of a colossal factory, a warped relic from the industrial age. Somehow in its phonic recreation, in its looking backwards through time, the events are rewound and flow backwards, the sounds are somehow unmade and become underworldly. They contain that specific horror evoked on looking upon yesterday’s ruins where the rats decay with the framework (B, 8:10) and at night, the ghosts of the machines still boom, hum and generate a cold heat; the haunting splashes of the previous inhabitants walking through the oily puddles tickle the ear (A, 5:00) and quieten to the roar of the siren and the cobwebbed common-room radio. The echoed reverberations of clanging metal send the night birds; the last fragment of life in the factory, madly fluttering and melting into the sky. - Jack Andrew Lenton
download: http://www.mediafire.com/?77lm2ba5id228bp
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Fossils / Spoils & Relics - Split - Mantile #014 (C30)
**********SOLD OUT**********
A side - Fossils - 'Whybrow'
This number was called up from a time before the chicken lizards dance was even conceived. When the telephone was his sole method of communication. He always claimed to be a Mr Whybrow; Always banging on about this rustle and a bustle seeping out of an appartment down st.james. He said it wasn't music. I told him he had to be kidding, and that it'd be a farr off payneful place with no known personel, and instruments, for that kind of tripe. Next you'll be claiming one of your party is named smith! he just screamed back at me "i'm so much higher (brow) than you guys". Whybrow indeed. - Mantile
B Side - Spoils & Relics - 'Shut In Place'
Shut In Place - Overlooks leeds six's current landfill epidemic from a penthouse view. The bins check inn amidst dying lights and begin to empty themselves over the dining table. Foreign objects, twisted spools and infernal devices are gathered and arranged dribbling new recycled fluids that scour and cleanse textured corridors. Waste forms trip left to right down uneven stairs, the fluids seep through the ceiling forming puddles in the empty lobby. New rooms unlocked.. too late to check out. Shut in place. - KP
A side - Fossils - 'Whybrow'
This number was called up from a time before the chicken lizards dance was even conceived. When the telephone was his sole method of communication. He always claimed to be a Mr Whybrow; Always banging on about this rustle and a bustle seeping out of an appartment down st.james. He said it wasn't music. I told him he had to be kidding, and that it'd be a farr off payneful place with no known personel, and instruments, for that kind of tripe. Next you'll be claiming one of your party is named smith! he just screamed back at me "i'm so much higher (brow) than you guys". Whybrow indeed. - Mantile
B Side - Spoils & Relics - 'Shut In Place'
Shut In Place - Overlooks leeds six's current landfill epidemic from a penthouse view. The bins check inn amidst dying lights and begin to empty themselves over the dining table. Foreign objects, twisted spools and infernal devices are gathered and arranged dribbling new recycled fluids that scour and cleanse textured corridors. Waste forms trip left to right down uneven stairs, the fluids seep through the ceiling forming puddles in the empty lobby. New rooms unlocked.. too late to check out. Shut in place. - KP
