Sounds: DARDIS
DARDIS is an ongoing experimental ambient sound-art project, exploring noise and alternative approaches to music.
[Releases available on all good streaming/download platforms. Except where directed, Bandcamp links are provided.]
[Releases available on all good streaming/download platforms. Except where directed, Bandcamp links are provided.]
DARLING ZERO
released 15/01/24 by Adventurous Music 1. Phase 1 2. Phase 2 3. Phase 3 4. Return to the Zero |
FUNEREALISM
released 11/11/22, Inner Demons Records 1. Funerealism Part 1 2. Funerealism Part 2 3. Funerealism Part 3 4. Funerealism Part 4 "Seriously impressive stuff, with multi-layered sounds that are perfect for losing yourself in." - This Is Darkness "This sounds great... a single well thought out jewel of a release." - 1208 North Fuller Ave Apt 1 |
A CHAIN REACTION OF VARIOUS CRACKS
released 11/11/22, Inner Demons Records 1. Ankle Grinder 2. Ankle Grinder (Redux) 3. A Crack in the Redux 4. A Persistent Echo Heard Through the Rain "Acts as a kind of incidental music for the soundtrack of your life (when things are not going terribly well for you)... This is not the easy listening kind of dark ambient though. It is too jagged, too rough around the edges to simply put it on and read a good book. This demands more from the listener than that. And it is worth it." - Chain DLK |
SINGLES 1-12
released 19/08/22 1. Sleep Machine (released 27/05/22) 2. Slow Train to the Moon (released 03/06/22) 3. Sound Star (released 10/06/22) 4. A Felony (released 17/06/22) 5. Quicksilver Thumb (released 24/06/22) 6. Twinkling (released 01/07/22) 7. Taking Off (released 08/07/22) 8. Graves for Horses (released 15/07/22) 9. Stellar Nursery (new mix) (original mix released 22/07/22) 10. Strung Up Banshee (released 29/07/22) 11. A Skip in the Moment (Released 08/08/22) 12. Discarded Mannequins (released 16/08/22) 13.Quicksilver Thumb (Guitar Mix) (bonus track) 14. Quicksilver Thumb (Piano Mix) (bonus track) 15. Sleep Machine (Thereminimal edit) (bonus track) Compilation of tracks originally released on streaming services between May to August 2022. |
BIG DUMB GUITAR E.P.
Released 23/04/21 1. Berlin's Burning 2. Other Voices 3. That's So Punk! 4. Blues Stomp 5. Let's Go Back To Mono 6. Me And My Guitar Early demos from 2012-2014. All these songs were recorded on REALLY basic equipment: a headset mic, and a simple one-track WAV editor app on Windows XP. You had to record a whole track, then play it back loud and record a new track in a new window for the app at the same time. All the drums were recorded in a garage using one microphone. This is really, truly, lo-fi stuff here. I've loads of tracks like these gathering digital dust on a laptop. Most of them are so poor quality, the playback isn't worth listening to. The tracks are have been edited and cleaned up slightly using Audacity, and serve as a reminder of some simple punk roots. |
PROJECTIONS EP
released 27/08/21, Rancid Idols Productions 1. Tree Tunnel (Instrumental Version) 2. Beat (Up) The Clock 3. Blood Red Sky A collection of three tracks from three different projects. |
BACK TO WORK
released 06/10/21, 1tracktape (part of their New Moon series) 1. Back To Work Capturing office noises and business stresses, 'Back to Work' takes its inspiration from the office environment as a drone soundscape, casting the post-pandemic return to work as nightmarish and unavoidable. There are sounds of office workers chatting, lunching, air conditioning, the whirr of laptops and bored fingers, corridors and shared space. It finds empathy in something we all dread, yet scorns the fixity of work. For those who would rather be elsewhere. |
FLUXUS INCAPACITATED
released 23/06/21, Default Standard Records 1. Experiment 1 (Anti-record 1, 33 1/3 rpm) 2. Experiment 2 (Anti-record 1, 78 rpm) 3. Experiment 3 (Anti-record 2, 33 1/3 rpm) 4. Experiment 4 (Anti-record 2, 33 1/3 and 78 rpm) 5. Experiment 5 (Anti-record 3, 45 rpm) 6. Experiment 6 (Anti-record 3, 78 rpm) 7. Experiment 7 (Anti-record 3, manually manipulated speeds) 8. Experiment 8 (Anti-record 4, 33 1/3 rpm) 9. Experiment 9 (Anti-record 4, 78 rpm) 10. Experiment 10 (Anti-record 4, 45 rpm) All sounds recorded off treated vinyl: scratched, scored, painted on, burnt and/or warped. The treated record then becomes an "anti-record", or noise record. |
RE:START
released 05/05/2021, Rancid Idols Productions 1. Upbeat on the Outside 2. Garage Space 3. The Public Beat 4. Spooky Truth 5. First Steps 6. It's A Trap 7. Echo in the Key of [ ] 8. Found In Space 9. Faster Than Your Average Witch 10. Piano Experiment No. 2 A throwaway album experimenting with loops using the Bandlab app, along with other samples and added extras. Not the usual DARDIS fare, be warned! |
KITHARA
released 07/04/2021, Rancid Idols Productions 1. Dobro Intro 2. Driving a Horse Through the Eye of a Needle 3. A Scarf on the Neck of a Statue 4. Clicks and Whistles 5. Temporal Ringlets 6. Tanpura Warm Up, Pt. 1 7. Tanpura Warm Up, Pt. 2 8. Tanpura Warm Up, Pt. 3 9. Tampura Drone 10. Interlude 1 11. An Unavoidable Consequence of Living 12. Interlude 2 13. Ruler 14. An Outro These tracks contain acoustic or unamplified guitar, over subdued ambient tones. Sometimes the guitar patterns will follow a pattern, a rhythm; at stages, there break off, deviate, stray from the established line. The idea was not to follow tradiitonal song structure, but to use the guitar to help aid the (a)tonal mood; to adapt the guitar for use in an ambient setting, without applying the standard approaches to playing. Therefore, alternative tunings were applied for most of these tracks, with the guitar pieces partly improvised to allow for fresh and immediate responses. |
SHEER VOCALISM
released 17/10/20, aquietroom 1. Digital vibrations of human aggression 2. Candy Mouth 3. Small escapes from beneath the wheel 4. Presidential grunts 5. A lonely train runs up the mountain 6. Baking 7. The first ghost of time 8. The second ghost of time 9. The third ghost of time 10. Omnipresent reprise 11. "The soft rushing sound from the river" 12. "a child's voice called across the stream at night" All the sounds heard here originate from the human voice: hums, grunts, whistles, moans, squeals, growls, mumbles, whispers, hisses, and other undefinable noises. The album was partly inspired by Mike Patton's 'Adult Themes For Voices', which entirely uses similar manipulations and distortions of the voice. The idea behind the album was to restrict the source material to its most basic and immediately available: one voice, and one microphone. And then to see where it was possible to take that voice. The titles of the last two tracks are lines taken from Hermann Hesse's 1906 novel 'Beneath the Wheel'. |
ZWISCHENZUG
released 27/09/20, aquietroom 1. The black knight vs the white pawn 2. Computations and error logs 3. Contemplation 4. Zugzwang 5. Out of moves 6. You must know the bitterness of defeat before you can taste the sweetness of victory Recorded over Christmas 2019, ZWISCHENZUG finds parallels in the computations and endless variations of the game of chess and mental health, in a sea of ambient drone sounds and experimental noise. ‘Zwischenzug’ is a tactic used in chess, where instead of playing the expected and obvious move, a player first inserts another move that poses an immediate threat, which the opponent must answer; only then is the expected move played. This mirrors the interrupted thought process and patterns of the unhealthy mind, either in sabotage itself with destructive thinking, or having to challenge and interrupt itself through CBT techniques. Likewise, the sounds of offer establish and then interrupt themselves, rarely settling. Foregoing traditional structures of tone, melody and rhythm, rather the tracks largely rely on improvisation and indeterminism to build up their soundscapes. |
HASSIUM EP
released 10/05/20 1. Everything Together In Perfect Harmony 2. With Everything Else 3. Most Stable Isotope 4. Unniloctium 5. Ekaosmium The chemical element hassium does not occur naturally, and has only been made under labortory conditions. In its most stable form, it only has a half-life of a mere 16 to 22 seconds. The album extends this idea of being highly unstable to the depressed mind, exploring how anxiety greatly emcumbers and shortens our own lives, how just in the aspect of time, but of experience. Guitar patterns breakdown, distortion interfers, background noise takes over. A person falls out of tune, harmony is lost, and yet the unformed days find their own counter-melody. |
EXORCISING FIACC
released 02/12/19 1. By the Black Stream 2. Odour of Blood 09:34 3. Nights in the Bad Place (1st Night) 4. Nights in the Bad Place (2nd Night) 5. By the Back Stream (Reprise) 6. Return to the Red Earth Works inspired by the writings of Belfast poet Padraic Fiacc, who passed away earlier this year (2019). Reading material: By the Black Stream (Dublin, The Dolmen Press, 1969); Odour of Blood (Kildare, The Goldsmith Press, 1973); Nights in the Bad Place (Belfast, The Blackstaff Press, 1977); Red Earth (Lagan Press, 1996) |
CACHEXIA
released 01/10/19 1. Cachexia 3 2. Cachexia 2 3. Cachexia 1 4. Cachexia 0 5. Cachexia -1: Autophagy, Pt. 1 6. Cachexia -2: Autophagy, Pt. 2 cachexia /kəˈkɛksɪə/ noun: weakness and wasting of the body due to severe chronic illness. Exploring themes of hunger and starvation: physical, emotional, spiritual; enforced, voluntary or delusional. Counting down from three, two, one... nothing. |
CUT FROM PAPER
released 05/09/19 1. Paper Cuts (fourth variation) 2. Paper Cuts (first variation) 3. Paper Cuts (fifth variation) 4. Paper Cuts (second variation) 5. Paper Cuts (sixth variation) 6. Paper Cuts (third variation) A sound experiment partially inspired by Steve Roden's lower case album, Forms of Paper. All tracks contain manipulated sounds recorded from folding, bending, scrunching, twisting and waving one piece of A4 paper. Half the tracks also contain improvised guitar. |
YOU FATHOMED THINGS: A SOUNDTRACK TO 'THE DOGS OF HUMANITY'
released 01/08/2019 1. "A dog once drowned down there..." 2. "...the elasticity of youth." 3. "...the cows anchored to their fields..." 4. "...nothing bites and the sea is gone..." Contains ambient sounds inspiried by, and designed to be listened to while reading, the poetry collection 'The Dogs of Humanity' (Fly on the Wall Press, 2019) |
NOISE KNIFE
released 07/07/19 1. Cnife 1 2. Cnife 2 3. Alba Beyond the White Plane 4. Ping Pig A collection of ambient sound pieces inspired by the works of Samuel Beckett. 'Alba Beyond the White Plane' derives from the poem 'Alba'. The title 'Noise Knife' derives from Beckett's 'No's Knife' (Collected Shorter Prose, 1947-1966). |
AN UNAVOIDABLE CONSEQUENCE OF LIVING EP
released 20/05/19 1. An Unavoidable Consequence of Living 2. Piano Breath 3. Mull 4. The High End This EP started off as the first part of an intended longer album: but the more I listened to these four tracks, the more it felt like a self-contained piece of work. It extends the theme of previous pieces, exploring a meditative soundscape that straddles the fine border between relaxation and dis-ease. |
TRAIN OBSERVATIONS
released 20/05/19 1. Train Observation 3 2. Train Observation 2 3. Train Observation 1 Three variations on a theme. Initial field recordings captured 13 and 15/05/19, on a two hour train journey. The same guitar track, explored in three different ways, filter through the three pieces. All other sounds are either from the train itself, railway signals, or from the noises inside the carriage. |
SHOWER SCENES
released 20/05/19 1. Chosen Sewers 2. Chew Soreness All the sounds of these pieces derive from the sound of a bathroom shower. I was looking for a sustained sound that could not be completely controlled, that allowed a level of indeterminacy in what came out. A few days previous, I had made the field recordings for Train Observations, exploring a similar theme, and was contemplating what other sounds would give the same effect. Then I heard my wife switch on the shower... the constant movement of the body, affecting how the water falls and hits the bathtub, how we can determine the length of the shower but not the exact sounds within... these echo the lack of control we have sometimes over our moods and emotions, how we struggle to find a steady baseline, but are constantly fluctuating around, like running water. |