Morbig by Guilhem All

Guilhem All is based in Brest, Brittany, France. He does sweet and terrible things to bright red record players.

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Morbig is the Breton word for the Eurasian oystercatcher, "a wader in the Haematopodidae family. It is the most widespread of the oystercatchers, with three races breeding in western Europe, central Eurosiberia, Kamchatka, China, and the western coast of Korea. No other oystercatcher occurs within this area. The extinct Canary Islands oystercatcher (Haematopus meadewaldoi), formerly considered a distinct species, may have actually been an isolated subspecies or distinct population of the Eurasian oystercatcher."

Guilhem doing his thing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufI5oIFK6nM

A Eurasian oystercatcher doing its thing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjCjDU2IlQM

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Copies on cassette: 30
Digital copies: ∞

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REVIEW FROM VITAL WEEKLY, ISSUE 1272:

"One of the saving graces of lockdown is that people are at home. They have time on their hands, and they are getting creative. This is resulting in an explosion of new releases and labels. One new label that is really exciting to me is Complex Holiday. Run by Kurt Buttigieg and Robert Farrugia they have so far put out four cassettes and a 12” since June 2020. The first two releases were strong. Ayn II Widen’s ‘How to Remain in Perpetual Contact with Your Surroundings’ was a piece of wonderful ambient electroacoustic experimental pop and Robert Farrugia’s ‘Worn’ was filled with a glorious drone after drone. While all the releases created independently of each other, they all exhibit similar motifs and themes. Their forays into sound collage, drone and musique concrete and help to create the labels voice.

While listening to Complex Holiday’s recent releases I am taken away to worlds with lurid landscapes. There is a wonderful woozy sway to ‘Confiance en Toi’, on Kurt Buttigieg’s ‘Unfolding’. The outro feels like a mixture of feedback, static and white noise. It is a fitting end to a song that is brought to mind what Woking looks like after the red weed has taken over in HG Wells’ ‘War of the Worlds’. It is utterly enchanting but there is a feeling of unease that creeps up your neck from the moment it starts and never quite leaves you. It’s wonderful.

If ‘Unfolding’ was about taking you out of reality, then ‘Morbig’ by Guilhem All and ‘The Interior’ by Peter Sant are all about keeping you grounded with sounds you know but can’t quite place. The opening of ‘Gimmie Amen’ sounds like vinyl crackling. Or is that a fire burning, clock cogs moving, or plastic being crunched up, either way, it gets your attention from the offset. As ‘Gimmie Amen’ progresses rhythmic beats, for want of a better term, appear. As they become more pronounced the song moves into a techno loop. We’re not talking a big room banger here, more of minimal lo-fi fare. It works incredibly well. There are massive choral sounding pieces that come from nowhere and vanish almost as soon as they’ve begun, this gives the song a strangely religious vibe, but given the name, this isn’t that surprising. What is surprising is how playable ‘Gimmie Amen’ is. It flies joyously out of the speakers. Two-thirds of the way through the motifs from the opening is repeated. This gives the song the feeling of a never-ending round. ‘The Interior’ opens with a hiss of the faint sound of traffic. A slowly the sound of birds starts to appear. Pigeons, chickens, parrots, and other avian noises start to fly from the speakers. As ‘Scene One’ progresses the birdsong gets more frantic and reaches a crescendo before gently fading out. ‘Dust on the Ivories’ is effectively one elegant drone. It starts of serene but as it goes on it becomes more aggressive until a minute from the end it reaches a peak and just stays there.

What makes these releases, and the previous two, so exciting is the mystery to them. What are these field recordings of? Where were they recorded and why? As there are no defined answers it is let to us, the listener, to try and piece it all together. This is where the enjoyment comes from. You hear a noise, and it reminds you of an old flat you lived in around 2006. A moment later there is a deep bassline that skews into an operatic section that reminds you of going to church as a child. But the soundscapes are abstract and it’s hard to come to conclusions that justify their brilliance. These releases show that Complex Holiday has a very bright future as long as it continues to release forward-thinking music like this. The complexity of the compositions is fantastic, as is the musician’s ability to make them incredibly captivating and playable." -- Nick Roseblade, Vital Weekly

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Itinerant label for inside-out ambient and sound art tomfoolery.

Postage and demo info, see website.

Founded in ∞ 2020. Anchored in Valletta, Malta.

Run by Kurt Buttigieg and Robert Farrugia.

complexholiday.com
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