ANDREW LILES

BLACK SEA
Forming part of 'The Vortex Vault' a mail-order only series of 12 CDs.

TRACK LISTING
Anhedonia
Olisbos (Introduced Instruments into the Belly of Another)
Padavona
(The long running Dispute over the D.O.B of R.J.D)
Black Sea - Part iii
(A Return to the Bottom of the Ocean)
Black Sea - Part ii (Danny Buoy)
Black Sea - Part i
(Semen, Salt, Sweat, Blood, Seamen)

A thousand thanks to Ernesto Tomasini, Darius Akashic, Jackie Pickup and Jack Richardson-Cox who added voices to ‘Anhedonia’. Further thanks to Annie Kerr who plays violin on trks 2 and 5 and Richard Miles who supplied the ambience at the start of ‘Black Sea - Part I’.


REVIEWS

Bizarre Magazine
Consisting of 12 individually released CDs, this is, in part, a collection of unreleased material from one of the UK's finest electronic experimentalists' studio archives. A collaborator with similar sound envelope-pushers such as Nurse With Wound and The Hafler Trio, Liles' music mixes minimalist drones with antique instrumentation and natural noise for a sonically surreal sound. This is dark ambience in its most eclectic form - sublime, sinister and visually spectacular.
By Billy Chainsaw


RE:GEN Magazine
October 24, 2007
By: Matthew Johnson

Part Six of The Vortex Vault sticks mostly to classically-inspired ambient, but it wouldn't be an Andrew Liles album without a surprise or two. The sixth entry in The Vortex Vault, Andrew Liles' collection of random pieces and outtakes, Black Sea sticks mainly to dark, minimalist soundscapes drawing on various classical traditions. "Anhedonia" opens things with an extensive creepy meditation, starting off with the cold reverberations of mournful choir singing, but then moves into a surrealist spoken-word piece, with a man teaching a child to memorize by repetition such evocative yet bizarre phrases as "These are not angels, these are hovering flies" and "We are alone with Walnut Mary." It's at once nonsensical and completely chilling. "Olisbos (Introduced Instruments into the Belly of Another)" and "Padavona (The Long Running Dispute Over the D.O.B. of R.J.D.)" are each instrumental snippets barely longer than their titles, the first built around the scraping gypsy violin of Annie Kerr and the second centering on a moody piano phrase. Finishing things up is the title piece, presented in three parts in descending order. "Black Sea, Part III (A Return to the Bottom of the Ocean)" is dark ambient, crafted of studio-manipulated choir pads, their attack and decay lengthened extensively and drenched in sustain. With its tidal washes of soft fuzz, it's like a less ghostly take on Salt Marie Celeste by Nurse With Wound, with whom Liles is a frequent collaborator and live performer. "Black Sea, Part II (Danny Buoy)" is more dissonant and industrial, with lots of slow rumbles and metal scrapes, though it eventually adds piano and a reprise of Kerr's violins. Then, is if to call the quiet avant-garde classical of the rest of the album into question, "Black Sea, Part I (Semen, Salt, Sweat, Blood, Semen)" bursts forth from waves breaking softly upon a sandy beach into a noisy grind of instrumental garage rock, overloaded and overdriven. It's more like a Black Sabbath outtake than anything else on Black Sea, but it's also a fine example of what makes Liles such an intriguing noise artist. You can't ever rely on what he's done in the past as a predictor of what he might do in the future. That would be a curse if he was playing pop music, but it's a blessing for fans of the weird.