Bastard Island by Steven Ball

Now available here - https://stevenball.bandcamp.com/

"the weather is routinely
unseasonable
no reliable reports
unpredictable
set up the microphone
time enough to prepare..."

Linear Obsessional is proud to release the new album of songs by Steven Ball - whilst his fusion of avant-garde sounds and field recordings with composed songs bears comparison with Walker and Sylvian "Bastard Island" with its geographical imagery and pertinent subject matter combined with meticulously chosen backings is a unique and wonderfully unsettling experience. Plummeting short wave noise, distant guitar and organ drones create a shifting bed for the composer's distinctive croon. His strongest album yet.

Bastard Island arrives as a collection of speculative fiction dispatches from spatio-temporally ambiguous elsewheres and elsewhens. These descriptive songs are fragmented and episodic crypto-narrative participant observations. They evoke disrupted temporal, meteorological, geographical, and seasonal conditions, and local and global social inertia. The songs inhabit ambient soundbeds redolent with spatial diffraction, signal refraction, small sounds, and distance communication.

A picnoleptic production in the English Asteroid series, written and recorded by Steven Ball, Summer 2018.

Tracklist

1.	Time and the Weather	8:47

2.	Without Movement	4:09

3.	Small Sounds	5:59

4.	Pattern Accumulating	11:05

5.	Brownout	5:41

6.	In Dixon	4:28

7.	Mainland Distance	9:57

8.	Interior Night	4:09

Credits

released January 11, 2019

Bastard Island

written and performed by Steven Ball

recorded summer 2018 in New Cross, South East London
location recordings Melbourne Australia 1994 and 2017, London and Shetland 2018.
shortwave radio recordings Melbourne 1991 and London 2018

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REVIEWS
"Like a director of some impressionistic unscripted film, Steven Ball has created what I can only describe as field poetry, with a soundscape that blurs the lines between the conscious waking world and the mystical world beyond the veil. The instrumentation is never intrusive, hinting at possibilities rather than finalities. The songs are pieced together as happenstance, yet there is a disciplined compositional method at work here. This is a textured and intriguing work that draws you in and no, you’re not waiting for the chorus or hook. I played this album for a good week solid on the way to work and I found it had a calming effect on me.
So this is a recording that has a functional purpose too. To call this music something clichéd like ‘left field ambient’ would be doing it a gross injustice. This is an album that is a prime reason to explore music that is outside the peripheries of the mainstream and everything you are familiar with. I enjoy the unfamiliar journey of music like this. Stick with it and return to it; you will find it richly rewarding."
Alan Savage - Punk Noir
punknoirmagazine.com/2019/05/04/steven-balls-bastard-island-by-alan-savage/

License

CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. See the Creative Commons website for details.