Two new DARDIS albums from aquietroom

German ambeint net-label aquietroom invites you to the online launch of two albums from Northern Irish poet and sound artist Colin Dardis.

The first album, ZWISCHENZUG, is out of September 27th, available to pre-order now, with the first two tracks available to stream. 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.

The second album, SHEER VOCALISM, will be released on October 17th. All the sounds heard here originate from the human voice: hums, grunts, whistles, moans, squeals, growls, mumbles, whispers, hisses, and other undefinable noises. 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.