Water is the Sun coming to Soundart
Soundart Radio, the local community radio station for Totnes and Dartington, who have been quietly beavering away on the margins of experimental radio for 20 years this year, are getting ready to welcome a live performance and radio broadcast, on Saturday March 21st from the experimental, ambient drone duo ‘Water is the Sun’.
The band comprises of Michael (Mkl) Anderson, (who, although he may balk at the accolade, is highly regarded as an ‘elder statesman’of the contemporary ambient electronic underground) and Adam Parks (aka the solo project ‘Timber Rattle’) They will be stopping off at Soundart Radio’s Dartington Estate based studio on March 21st as part of an extensive European tour that starts in Prague and takes in several venues in Germany, before hitting the UK and playing venues in Norwich, Sheffield, & London & the south west, before once again crossing the channel for a further 18
dates, taking in cities across Europe from Strasburg to Llubjana, Graz and Reykjavik.
As ‘Water is the Sun’ their music is a cinematic landscape of textures that give slow birth to psyche-pastorals and intoned ritual songs; a music as informed by the devotional chants of West Coast cults and Appalachian hymns as it is by the dark new age and ambient resonance of the experimental scene that has embraced and supported both musicians for many years. The tour, in support of the new album ‘Ritual Fever’ will feature the pair playing the album in full, with its dual reference to an ecstatic state connected with nature, and an anxious lack in the context of modern-day alienation it is a sculpted studio document of a fully realized work which they present in its entirety during their live performance. The duo wilfully inhabits the liminal region between the colourful, diverse palette and improvisational possibilities of abstract sound, and more concrete universal song structures.
A foundation of becoming embraces the radical aspects of experimental means and aesthetics, even hearkening to a timeless primordial, culminating intermittently in the being of meditative folk-inspired compositions; intentional and accessible gestures that strive for an authentic shared feeling in the context of a world where social energy, information, sound and meaning are increasingly dissipate.
The live set is performed, as the album is recorded, with old tape machines, keyboards and field-/found-recordings; materials and instruments with capabilities and limitations which keep Water Is The Sun’s offering grounded in the physicality of playing music that is rooted in a celebratory world of sound.
Marc Masters, writing for The Best Experimental Music on Bandcamp about the groups 2021 release ‘Prairie Spells’ stated “Parks and Anderson make gritty ambient music that pushes forward more than it drifts around. There’s certainly a meditative quality to their thick, thoughtful sound fields, but the core of each piece is a driving element—a repeated piano chord, a pulsing scillation—that all the other layers align around. The bulk of the album has a film-score aura, but there’s more to Prairie spells than just scene-setting, as they conjure full worlds out of simple sounds.”
Mkl’s solo work under the name ‘Drekka’ has been exploring field recording, ritual, and collective listening experiences for 30 years. Amongst other’s he has released music with Cinders (Cindytalk/This Mortal Coil), and runs the respected label ‘Bluesanct’, which has released work from artists such as Low, Pantaleimon, Mount Eerie, & the aforementioned Cindytalk as well as many many other artists & his own work.
Chris, Soundart Radio’s indefatigable studio manager says “We feel especially lucky to be able to invite a local audience from Totnes, Dartington and the local area to share this special performance from ‘Water is the Sun’ here at our lovely studio on the Dartington Estate. The evening also coincides with the official release of the ‘Ritual Fever’ LP on Wellington’s Trome Records (another fine label of experimental and contemporary underground music) so we shall be celebrating that and hope to have some copies of the LP for sale on cassette, vinyl and CD.”
Tickets for the performance on Saturday March 21st are on sale now and can be obtained via https://soundartradio.org.uk/events/events/water-is-the-sun-al-fresco-skronk-squadron/ and it is expected that a limited number of tickets will also be available on the door.