In The Flicker is Leverton Fox’s eighth album of immersive, improvised experimental electronic music to date. Out on Friday 21st October the site-specific album is being released in the Dolby Atmos ‘surround’ format, as well as CD and digital formats.
Leverton Fox is the celebrated trio comprising trumpeter and electronic musician, Alex Bonney, drummer Tim Giles, and electronic musician and sound artist, Sam Britton, a.k.a. Isambard Khroustaliov. Recorded during the first summer respite of the COVID-19 pandemic (September 2020), In The Flicker is Leverton Fox’s eighth album to date. Across the seven segued tracks, Leverton Fox invite the listener on an immersive aural journey of improvised, experimental electronic music. Remarkably, the album was recorded outdoors, amongst the trees in a woodland in Sussex. Utilising pairs of ambient mics for the recording, Leverton Fox captured not only the other-worldly music and sounds created by the band, but also the natural sound environment of the woodland itself. Inspired by Sternklang, Stockhausen’s park music for five musician groups,
In The Flicker presents itself as a time-and-site-specific conversation between the musicians, interspersed and influenced by the setting and the surrounding sounds of nature. Recording an album in this unusual environment marked a divergence to the band’s approach, as Khroustaliov explains:
“Holed up in isolation during the pandemic and finding ourselves cherishing the unfolding of spring in 2020 in whatever natural spaces we were allowed to visit across the city, whilst also revelling in the respite from the constant din of aircraft and traffic, we began to hatch a plan – a kind of celebration in a way – to take Leverton Fox out of the studio and the club and into the open air. This album is the documentation of that impulse. It was the first time we had played together in nine months and the recording captures a moment of cathartic reprieve, an act of ‘music-ing’ that definitely made the most out of an otherwise traumatic hiatus that was felt the world over. Leverton Fox has always had improvisation at its core, but the act of making this recording was the first time we’ve really engaged with the idea that what we do is also in many senses site-specific. This record feels like the most brazen acknowledgement of something that is otherwise generally normalised under the title ‘Live at…’ etc. Here, context is centre-stage. The music we made that day still feels full of wonder and curiosity, looking forward, in its own idiosyncratic way, to a more empathetic future; the document of a moment of reflection, an acknowledgment of when the machine stopped and the uncanny situation so many of us went through and were asked to find peace with. The album title is a quote from Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s seminal exploration of identity and crisis in the face of an indifferent reality, the spirit of which seemed particularly resonant to us whilst we mixed and edited the album during the course of a second lockdown.”
In The Flicker was created through extensive use of analogue synths, drum machines, percussion, trumpet, and effects, alongside found objects, such as trees used for percussion and sounds from the environmental setting, tangentially making it the most explicitly ‘1970s-inspired’ album they’ve made. One might imagine outtakes from Ummagumma / Atom Heart Mother era Pink Floyd transacting with the expansive jams of the Grateful Dead’s Infrared Roses. Elsewhere there are haunting and melancholic reminders of the earthly, voice-like tone of Jon Hassell, the dank, latent danger of nature represented in Lars Van Trier’s Melancholia and Antichrist, the joyous machine and synth bubbling of Hancock’s Sextant, and the fluid ambient explorations of Oren Ambarchi. Leverton Fox’s In The Flicker, however, is a wholly unique album, one that not only documents but also beautifies a time and space.
In addition to its release as a stereo CD, In The Flicker is also being released in Dolby Atmos format. Dolby Atmos Music is an immersive music experience that adds more space, clarity, and depth to the aural experience and will be available on any device that is enabled with Dolby Atmos via streaming services.
*** BIOs ***
Leverton Fox
As Leverton Fox, Alex Bonney, Tim Giles and Isambard Khroustaliov collage together a battery of musical inspiration with a healthy dose of irreverence – from noise, lo-fi electronics and musique concrète, to free improvisation, breakcore and psychedelia. Formed in the late 2000s by Alex Bonney, Tim Giles and Matt Groom, the group produced their first LP, Country Dances (2009) for cult underground indie label Gravid Hands, alongside then label-mates Rocketnumbernine. Recorded partly in a disused barn in Berkshire as well as a variety of North London’s grungy music rooms, Country Dances epitomised a kind of no-wave post-millennium attitude to musicmaking that sought to tear up the expectations of both jazz and electronic dance music. Following Country Dances, the group began touring with a new line-up, featuring Isambard Khroustaliov from acclaimed electronica duo Icarus, in place of Matt Groom. Sharing stages with the likes of Norwegian improvising duo Humcrush, Polar Bear, Sons of Kemet, Sly and The Family Drone, and Blurt throughout the UK and Europe, this new formation cut their teeth improvising in front of audiences, channelling their eclectic mashup of influences into a visceral genre-defying maelstrom. Leverton Fox went on to make a string of genre-defying records where the group progressively explore and refine their improvisational sensibilities whilst simultaneously digging deeper into the margins of music production, from the episodic, cycloramas of The Human Arm (2012) and Smart Casual (2013), the stream of consciousness sensibilities of Velcro Bird (2016) and I Am Zebra (2019), to the individually produced algorithmic mixtapes of Megascopz (2019).
Alex Bonney
Alex Bonney is a trumpeter, electronic musician and recording/mix engineer and producer based in London. He leads the Alex Bonney Quartet, is a member of light.box, BABs, Golden Age of Steam, and The OlieBrice Quintet, and performs solo with electronics and in a variety of other improvising ensembles. When not performing, Alex works with a variety of artists producing and engineering music for leading jazz, improvised and contemporary music record labels including ECM.
Tim Giles
Drummer Tim Giles is an award-winning musician. Living in London, he is known for his collaborations with saxophonist James Allsopp, producer Ben Lamdin, and other leading lights of the UK jazz and improvised music scene. A musical prodigy, (winning a Telegraph Jazz Award for his childhood prowess), Tim started out backing jazz musicians that visited his home county of Suffolk. Whilst still in his teens, Tim was performing internationally with saxophonists Iain Ballamy and Stan Sulzmann at events such as the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, and St Louis Jazz Festival, Senegal (providing support for the late Joe Zawinul). He left school at sixteen, and moved to London to be a full-time musician.
Isambard Khroustaliov
Isambard Khroustaliov is the alias of electronic musician, composer and sound artist Sam Britton. Sam trained as an architect at the Architectural Association in London, but now works across the borders of music composition and performance, sound design and installation, software development and research. He holds a PhD in electronic music and composition and has been a resident composer and researcher at IRCAM in Paris and STEIM in Amsterdam. Sam has also worked with the London Sinfonietta as part of their Writing the Future commissioning scheme, with Aphex Twin on his Remote Orchestra project, and is an associate member of Matthew Herbert’s New Radiophonic Workshop. Since 1997 he has recorded and released music for a number of independent electronic music labels in the UK, Europe and the US (PAN, Temporary Residence, The Leaf Label & Output Recordings) and performs internationally with his various groups, solo, and in collaboration with numerous improvising musicians and ensembles.
Artist: Leverton Fox
Title: In The Flicker
Label: Not Applicable
Release date: Friday 21st October 2022
Format: CD / DL
Cat No: NOT062
Tracklist:
01 Crackle Bracken
02 Amethyst Deceiver
03 Bovine Interlude
04 Cryptozoology
05 LIDAR Hailing UFOs
06 Tågarp Time Travel
07 Brackle Cracken
Credits
Alex Bonney – electronics / pocket trumpet
Tim Giles – electronics / percussion
Isambard Khroustaliov – electronics
All tracks written by Leverton Fox
Recorded in a woodland in West Sussex, 17th September 2020
Mixed and mastered in Dolby Atmos at Coda to Coda, London by Leverton Fox and Will Worsley
Design & photography by Atelier Elephant
©℗ Not Applicable 2022
Not Applicable
Not Applicable is a group of musicians, composers, visual artists and filmmakers collaboratively developing
and openly prototyping new approaches to their respective artistic pursuits. Not Applicable is an openended framework which encompasses both the realisation and documentation of these collaborations in
the form of performances, installations, recordings, and films.
Not Applicable Recordings put out its first recording in 2002 and to date the catalogue numbers over 50 releases, featuring collaborations with numerous international artists, including Icarus, Rudi Fischerlehner, Leverton Fox, Damo Suzuki, Ted Milton, Isambard Khroustaliov, Oliver Duckert, Maurizio Ravalico, and OllieBown