Thomas Shrubsole & Craig Tattersall's 2014 untitled cassette reissued on Local Studies

Thomas Shrubsole & Craig Tattersall's out of print 2014 collaborative cassette has been reissued as an expanded digital release on Local Studies.

See here for details and to purchase: 

Tape Music by Thomas Shrubsole on Parenthetical Activities available digitally from Bandcamp

Thomas Shrubsole's Tape Music box set, released earlier this year in a limited Art Edition on Dissolving sub-label Parenthetical Activities, is now available to purchase in digital format from the Parenthetical Activities bandcamp page.

New Dissolving Records, Thomas Shrubsole, Sub Loam online shop

Dissolving Records online shop

Long time supporters and new customers alike are advised that as well as the usual channels (see below) there is now a Dissolving Records online shop for those who prefer that option.

Orders are as ever also more than welcome direct via email or by ordering through discogs or bandcamp, for those releases available there.

Thomas Shrubsole - Tape Music @ Boomkat

Tape Music is now available from Boomkat.com

Here is their take on it:

"Highly organic, kinetic concrete and reel-time ferric sculptures from Thomas Shrubsole, yielding almost 3 hours of lower case rustles resembling free jazz played by nature.
Working in a richly imaginative realm shared by everyone from Rashad Becker to Anne Guthrie, Ekoplekz to Decimus, ‘Tape Music’ is a significant batch of scrabbly abstraction from one of the North West’s most quietly unassuming and uncompromising operators. Working hands-on with his trusted reel-to-reel, found objects and 2nd-hand instrumentation, Shrubsole enacts a form of intimate animism that gives life to sounds lesser heard. Mixing skin with grit and machine, his improvised interventions coax out a plethora of almost anthropomorphic or bestial tones from things without a heart or brain, and effectively using his own body to better connect with the world around him and bring listeners to a granular, haptic level of musical perception.
Recorded in 2015 and left to mulch in the archive, the results are entirely analog from nose to tail, exploring a bio-organic feedback system that investigates, in his own words, “notions of the prosaic and the exotic, the personal as it pertains to the physically local and the distant, proximate and disembodied, the diaristic and the documentary: Kinetic performative physical improvisational concrete.” "

Copies are also available direct by emailing dissolving or through dissolving on discogs.

Vital Weekly review of Sub Loam - Excavated Relics

Thanks to Frans de Waard for reviewing Sub Loam's Excavated Relics cassette:

'Back in 2016, Thomas Shrubsole released 'The Portable archive' under his Sub Loam name (see Vital Weekly 1051), which was culled from material he already recorded in 2009 and 2010. It is something I enjoyed very much, as Sub Loam is something along the lines of lo-fi electronics, drones, ambience, and field recordings. Now there is a tape with "two recently rediscovered examples" from the same period, which Sub Loam feels they should be heard out there as well, and, sure, why not? This is something that could have also been surely been on the original release. On the first side, there is 'Soil Surface', a slow rhythm piece. Or perhaps something that is on a loop device but slowed down quite a bit. In sync we have a mild synth sound burping away. It is a very moody piece and almost a dub-like one at that; all bass but no dance riddim. This is a particularly great piece by Sub Loam. The B-side contains 'Stone Fragment', in which the guitar plays quite a big role, strummed in a really odd way, and set against a set of misty electronic backing, with an odd flanging effect on the strings. It seems like he's playing the guitar with a stick, creating odd timbres. Buried in the background there is a bit of percussion. It is a totally different kind of piece and a most enjoyable one at that as well. I sure can believe that if you found this after ten years you would want to release it.' (FdW)

Review from Vital Weekly issue number 1208

Buy a copy by emailing direct or from Boomkat

Sub Loam - Excavated Relics Cassette Now Available from Boomkat

Limited copies of Excavated Relics are now available from Boomkat (link below)

https://boomkat.com/products/excavated-relics


Here's what they have to say about it:

"Gauzy, low-key, organically textured dub and wizened folk explorations from Thomas Shrubsole, reviving his Sub Loam alias with two ‘Excavated Relics’ from the archive circa 2009-2010.

The A-side’s Soil Surface’ speaks to Shrubsole’s signature grasp of slow-moving sonic murk with nearly 10 minutes of endearingly weary dub chords perfused with acidic percolations that appear to mimic a sped-up (but still very slow) time-lapse image of soil dynamics, while the other side’s 11 minute piece ’Stone Fragment’ catches him picking out coruscating guitar strings and against peripheral percussion and distant vocal drones in a style murkily resonating with the mystic appeal of Zoviet France. Both are assuredly swaddled in layers of ferric tape hiss. Both humbly worth your time."

Forthcoming on Parenthetical Activities: Thomas Shrubsole - Tape Music

Coming soon on Dissolving sub-label Parenthetical Activities, a special limited edition Double Cassette/Art Box Set containing two and a half hours of music and a 48-page full-colour art booklet alongside postcards and inserts.


Available Soon.

https://soundcloud.com/parentheticalactivities

http://parentheticalactivities.blogspot.com/

Supplement to the Portable Archive: Sub Loam - Excavated Relics

 Supplement to the Portable Archive

Additional Items Received 2019

Two recently rediscovered examples of Anomalous Loam dating from c. 2009 - 2010 excavated and displayed on professional, high quality, real-time duplicated cassettes in a clear cassette case with printed j-card and cardboard outer slipcase.

Outliers from the early trilogy of Cotton Goods/Dissolving releases Ohr, 2 and Earthern Circle (2009 - 2010, as documented on The Portable Archive and digitally), these two tracks, around ten minutes each, are thematically and musically related whilst standing at a remove from the circle of those original releases. Four-track murk, hiss and delay, fragmentary percussives, guitar strings as contour lines and twisting stems, burgeoning organic clouds, analogue electronics, observation and contemplation.

The connections with the spiked rural wanderings of Earthern Circle, the heavy soil dubs of 2 and the radiant moods of Ohr are clear whilst also travelling outwards from those zones towards the territory where these two other, previously unreleased, distinct artefacts were discovered.

Two Archaic Remnants, excavated from magnetic tape 2018.

Released October 19, 2019

All instruments, music, recording, production, artwork etc. Sub Loam (Thomas Shrubsole) 

C22. 45 Copies only. 

Available to order directly.

Email Sub Loam or Dissolving Records

Thomas Shrubsole - Themes and Variations (Parenthetical Activities) - Available now

Buy from boomkat https://boomkat.com/products/themes-and-variations

or read and order direct: http://parentheticalactivities.blogspot.com/

https://soundcloud.com/parentheticalactivities

Thomas Shrubsole - Themes and Variations (Parenthetical Activities)

Please note, new album and new label, coming later this month.

https://soundcloud.com/parentheticalactivities/thomas-shrubsole-themes-and-variations-album-preview

New Sub Loam announced for August 2017

Sub Loam has a new release out in August. Check here for further details and sound clips.

Sub Loam Bandcamp

There is now a Sub Loam Bandcamp page here

Currently uploaded projects include the previously released Dissolving and Cotton Goods album included in The Portable Archive, Ohr, 2 and Earthern Circle alongside an expanded edition of The Ley Hunter's Companion and a digital reissue of Sub Loam's piece for the Unofficial Countryside compilation on Wist from 2014. More will be uploaded in due course no doubt, but for now, head over and take a listen...

Sub Loam - The Portable Archive - Now Available at Boomkat

https://boomkat.com/products/the-portable-archive

Please note:  The Portable Archive is now sold out from Boomkat, the remaining few copies are now available by emailing directly.

"First and foremost it’s lovely to be immersed back into the project, whose naturally textured and decaying structures emerged as quietly as they dissolved back at the turn of this decade, finding good company amidst the rustle and hum of Cotton Goods and, in a way, could be said to preempt the focus of FIS’ research in similar, if noisier, rugged terrain on his From Patterns to Details album.
No mistake, though; Sub Loam’s music is endearingly tactile and better defined by its textured, nuanced fidelity: Shrubsole handles his material like an environmental researcher or botanist making sketches on his rambles, offering poetic observations on the interactions of organic matter with “ditches, hedgerows, alleys, pavements and hill tops” modelled with an electro-acoustic palette and tape loops that quietly represent his subject’s subterranean root systems and intuitive sprawl in a series of concentric spirals and microtonal whorls.
Within his chloro-centric weltanschauung, Sub Loam divines the music of “rhythmic footfall, creeping rootstock, vaporous billows, transformational marginalia” in an esoteric yet tangible way that should sweetly resonate with anyone who appreciates the ebb and flow or warp and weft of nature on the smaller scales, as well as its larger form landscapes, and who can appreciate the same within the parameters of ambient music.
A beautiful package."


Limited copies of previous Sub Loam releases are still available direct from Dissolving

Listen: https://soundcloud.com/dissolvingrecords/sub-loam-a-concise-dictionary

https://soundcloud.com/dissolvingrecords/sub-loam-ruderal-memory-henge

https://soundcloud.com/dissolvingrecords/sub-loam-ley-hunters-companion

Back catalogue items that are still available from Dissolving are The Ley Hunter's Companion and Ruderal Memory (both cost £9.00 each plus shipping to your location)

A Concise Dictionary of Plants and Their Uses is now sold out.

email dissolving (dot) records (at) yahoo (dot) co (dot) uk for any orders or enquiries or buy through discogs https://www.discogs.com/seller/dissolving/profile

The Portable Archive by Sub Loam, photos, sounds and pre-order information...

The Portable Archive is now available to pre-order, follow the link to the Sub Loam site with descriptions, pictures, sound clips and information on how to order:

http://subloam.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/the-portable-archive-limited-art.html

Sub Loam Portable Archive Soundcloud Preview

Sub Loam has posted a preview of the soon-to-be-released archive box-set containing his long out of print first trilogy of albums for Dissolving and Cotton Goods from 2009 and 2010.

http://subloam.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/the-portable-archive-audio-preview.html

Spooked, spiked, spoked, spooled; levitational and particuar rural, ruderal ambiences, be sure to lend them an ohr. The box set comes with risograph art prints, poems and a 20-page 'concrete guidebook' furher illuminating in flickering fragment Sub Loam's earlier explorations and classic day routes for meditative ramblings.

https://soundcloud.com/subloam/the-portable-archive-preview

Sub Loam re-issues and unreleased archival material announced

Ohr (originally released Cotton Goods, 2009), 2 (Originally released Dissolving, 2010) and Earthern Circle (orginally released Cotton Goods 2010)

+ 2 extra previously unreleased albums from the same era issued to be issued together and available soon in one package, The Portable Archive.

Announced here: http://subloam.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/the-portable-archive-sub-loam-re-issues.html

Interested Parties Are Also Directed

To point their browsers...

here: http://www.localstudiesunit.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/thomas-shrubsole-craig-tattersall.html

Triple tape action on pre-order, feat. Thomas Shrubsole and Craig Tattersall.

New Department

For those who may or may not have picked up Thomas Shrubsole (Dissolving, Sub Loam) & Craig Tattersall's (Humble Bee, Cotton Goods) first release who might or may or may not have or perhaps will or will not or may in the future enjoy it or consider doing so and even those who haven't, please direct your attention additionally to a new, tripartite report from a new department initiated by the pair...

cast your browsers to the shelves in this direction - https://soundcloud.com/local-studies/thomas-shrubsole-craig-tattersall-new-album-preview

Additional details will surface no doubt, and will be photostatted here for the curious.

Sub Loam reviewed in The Wire

Sub Loam's latest was given favourable notice in the 2014 Rewind issue of The Wire magazine.

See below for more details:

http://www.subloam.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/ov-wires-and-connections.html

For anyone intrigued in further exploring the tangled sonic undergrowth of the Sub Loam back catalogue the following titles are still available direct from dissolving

Sub Loam - Ruderal Memory (Henge 008)  £9.00

Sub Loam - A Concise Dictionary of Plants and Their Uses (Henge 010)  £9.00

Limited copies of the Unofficial Countryside release that features the Sub Loam piece reviewed in The Wire are also available from dissolving. 

Additionally, for anyone wanting to push on further towards related outer sonic reaches, other projects involving Thomas Shrubsole that are still available from dissolving include:

Space Capsule - Space Capsule (Henge 009) £9.00

T. Shrubsole - C. Tattersall - Cassette (Other Ideas OTC 002) £6.00

Prices do not include postage.

As always, mail for orders, enquiries, trades, etc.

Botanical Reflections

Stuart Marshall in The Sound Projector about Sub Loam's Concise Dictionary of Plants and Their Uses:

"Again and again I return to this intriguing mini CD from Sub Loam (i.e. saxophonist and SP reviewer Thomas Shrubsole), as if it would yield to me its mysteries, but alas! Swiftly am I ensnared and borne upon its pulsating airways, yet just as swiftly it’s over! Where fled those rogue minutes? In this wise, concise designates more than botanical taxonomy, though both here are central concerns: manifest in the splicing of Shrubsole’s pithy breath work and the bloom and swirl of spectral electronic backdrops. Most distinct is this in the first of the three untitled pieces: multiple rows of delicate, trowel-headed honks slowly summoning wispy, electroacoustic spirits, while at the same time suggesting an attitude of horticultural preparation that inspires me to chop carrots in concert. Tracks two and tree are (even) giddier: a tiny sax twittering like butterfly wings caught in swerving currents of pure colour; and finally a slow kaleidoscopic reimagining of all that has preceded. It’s an unearthing of unearthly sensations that could well uproot your mental stability. 39 further copies of the CDR are in existence, all of which are accompanied by a hand-numbered A4-sized abstract print by the artist."

 http://www.thesoundprojector.com/2014/09/24/natural-kingdoms/

Limited copies still available direct from Dissolving. As always, email for availability for this, any other Dissolving and related releases and for any other enquiries.