Simon McCorry

Simon McCorry – Mouthful of Dust – Polar Seas Recordings

On occasion it would be altogether easier, a more simple process, to ask you to engage with a piece of music for yourself. The reason I say that is because Mouthful of Dust feels almost too personal to touch, like uncovering a lost moment in time gone forever. This is a remarkable series of pieces from Simon McCorry, which should come as no surprise, spanning six numbers. Scoring the story of particular points of experience for the artist you can obviously relate to the fact that they were not good ones. However, and as art has its own way of translating traumatic situations into creative expressions of value, the end result has at least made something wonderful. It’s not always an easy listen but it is a poignant and breath taking, exhilarating one all the same. Like being positioned upon a silver knife edge, sequencing tales of danger through treated sounds of cello and modular synthesis. Fast forward and slow reverse.

PS. Look at the cover art is by photographer & artist Nikoletta Monyok.

Release: November 18
Buy https://polarseasrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/mouthful-of-dust
https://www.simonmccorry.com

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Konstruct – Soundworks

Words don’t really serve this experience well. It’s like letters hitting a wall and failing in disarray as the music is so all encompassing, to an almost frightening degree, that it almost proves difficult to formulate the meaning contained within the airwaves. Captured from a live performance at Ground Works last year these five tracks created by Andrew Heath, Simon McCorry and Phonsonic feature a range of instruments and synthesizers alongside treatments plugged into an electrical free-flow of improvisational thought. It is both deeply personal/ deeply intense like closing your eyes and letting go: ‘Taking inspiration from our activity within and our imposition on the landscape and nature around us’. It is also about light and shade and the colours in-between linking to your emotional response and is at times quietly reassuring as it is at others lost and wonderfully melancholic.

Release: January 21
buy https://simonmccorry.bandcamp.com/album/soundworks

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Simon McCorry – The Illusion of Beginnings and Endings – White Lab Recs

Sometimes descriptions can freeze the imagination locking you into cliques about response. Sometimes music means much more than just words when the music does not have words. Sometimes music doesn’t merit any at all. There are all sorts of words to describe Simon McCorry’s search for meaning through sound graphically tying together the emotional expanse of the human condition as viewed from the musician’s perspective. Like grains of black and white memory the depth of time is catalogued, referencing points of past brilliance while hauntingly incorporating them into the artist’s fertile landscape of danger and probability. There are hints of contrast too. Trying to celebrate a new-born release of joy for life, though the treatments given to the compositions often suggest an unease to the refrain as if something has remained stuck, or become unwound, or dislocated. The Illusion of Beginnings and Endings is perhaps brutally refreshing, captivating in sincere ways that challenge the listener to brush aside expectation. Perhaps it is none of those things as music is only truly open to your own interpretation.

Release: November 13
https://whitelabrecs.com
https://www.facebook.com/SimonMcCorryCellist

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Simon McCorry – Flow – See Blue Audio

Pressing play at first seems like a perfectly natural thing to do but as you are drawn deeper into the mind-set of Flow 01 things start to feel strange and uneven. Like floating in space or in the depths of an ocean the sounds surround your psyche, feeding back, supporting and reassuring you like a long lost friend, albeit a slightly odd one. The unconventional is course to be celebrated as Simon McCorry’s breathless story telling across Flow, spanning the numbers from 01 to 05, criss-crosses senses and sensualities in an ever increasingly wondrous nature. Blissful, serene and yet broken at the edges to reveal something unseen, blending codes and coda the final realisation is that time slips away from grasp, sometimes gently while at others not so. It is the quick succession of emotions turning upside down, perhaps even inside out that provides the key to it all. In other words it’s kind of like breathing….

Release: September 10
buy https://simonmccorry.bandcamp.com/album/flow
https://www.seeblueaudio.com

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Simon McCorry – Nature in Nature – See Blue Audio

Is it possible to overanalyse sound? Does that detach yourself from a more pure response to what you are hearing? Casting aside the thought for a moment Simon McCorry’s series of productions for this release each redefine the art of listening as layers of subsequent suggestion build upon, while sometimes tearing apart, what has gone before creating an unknown, uncertain quality. Background Thermal Radiation does precisely that by initially greeting you with warm envelopes of sound which are then pushed aside replaced by a grainier, more caustic resolution. Nature in Nature is perhaps more self-explanatory and again sequences notions of what is beautiful together with a contrasting edge like everything feels unsettled, which after all it is. Prometheus then opens out its reach into cosmic reality unbending, while Entanglement completes with over eight minutes of intense manufacture. Looping shimmering keys, offsetting its own pulse and then correcting it a cascade of otherworldly, spectacular imaginations leave you at the point of no return as you ponder exactly how to think about it all.

Release: January 29

buy https://simonmccorry.bandcamp.com/album/nature-in-nature-ep

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