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Starlings

by Starlings

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  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    Starlings' debut album is available on special limited edition CD, with beautiful artwork designed by the artist.

    Comes in a full-colour card jacket with a glossy finish and with a printed CD.

    Please note Bandcamp will add a little tax.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Starlings via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 5 days
    edition of 50 

      $15 NZD or more 

     

  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

      $10 NZD  or more

     

1.
Four 04:10
2.
Five 04:20
3.
Six-Two 03:59
4.
Eleven 05:18
5.
One 08:24
6.
Two 03:00
7.
Three 04:30
8.
Eight 03:36
9.
Nine 05:17
10.
Four-Three 07:43

about

"Sometimes a label’s name matches a release. This is the case with the self-titled album from Starlings, as the music ~ far from birdsong ~ seems to emanate from a machine shop at full shift" - A Closer Listen

Machine Records' latest release of 2021 is the debut album from Starlings, a new project by London-based artist Kevin Sorsby.

Initially through Cape Canaveral, Kevin has been crafting his unique sound for over two decades, with his first releases on and involvement in the creation of Machine Records in the early 2000s.

In 2016, Cape Canaveral resurfaced with an atmospheric EP titled 'We Love Like You', followed by a debut album, 'Inconvenience Me' in 2017. A captivating sonic manifesto, by turns meditative, ecstatic, pugilistic, and slightly terrifying, 'Inconvenience Me' journeyed into new textures and tones with few obvious reference points.

Starlings take a new direction, equally dense and spacious, structured yet chaotic, hypnotic yet focused.

August 2022 - Starlings mini-interview for CD release

Machine: What is the idea behind Starlings?

Kev: I’d always felt my output viewed as a whole over the years was incoherent, in that I never really had a single style or even knew whether that was a bad thing or not. Over the last five or six years I became really interested in some more fringe elements of experimental music, particularly atmospheric and freeform ones, sometimes not even really 'music'. So I started creating a range of jams and sounds which didn't fit what I was making for Cape Canaveral but seemed loosely connected to each other.

I found that I was building a new library of sounds and images, and ways of working which were all quite different to everything else I was doing, it was really basic and a nod back to my music-making roots decades ago.

I really like a lot of the visual imagery in the more ambient styles. I love things which sound and look unreal, dreamlike. So I came up with the name Starlings, which to me seems to fit - it's a specific thing but is also ill-defined and 'blurry'. There's also a certain beauty with it.

Machine: How do you work when you make these tracks?

Kev: In a practical sense, I have a basic idea about process, as in:”It might be interesting to connect this to that, then loop that to something else…” And I have a process for performance, which might be something like “Between 3 and 4 minutes change these controls gradually then turn that thing off.“ And record it. Take the good outcomes and iterate it. On a basic level that’s it, albeit with more connections and controls. Occasionally I have an idea which I specifically build the set-up to achieve, often it turns out not as good as the idea, sometimes it's much better than the idea.
A lot of what I do is very influenced by John Cage it seems.

Machine: It's been nearly a year since we released Starlings - Starlings. What are your thoughts looking back on it?

Kev: I was pleased with it once complete. Then when it became an album I suffered from the Is-It-Good-Enough-Compared-To-Everybody-Else syndrome. But as time went on and there was a bit of airplay, I heard other stuff around the same kind of realm and felt it was comparable and good enough. Now I think it's pretty good. I'm happy with it. There's things I'd change in hindsight but - and this also seems to be how I work with Starlings - it is what it is, it's very much what it sounds like and even if I wanted to re-programme it I couldn't as it's all entirely performance.

Machine: What’s next for Starlings?

Kev: Well, album two, 'Ax Locked In Pipeline', is done and coming out in November. I'm fairly certain there's a couple of EPs which draw from another set of tracks I have, and I have a bunch of linked ideas which I really want to get started and see where they go as they could be a thematic shift. if they work, I suspect these would be Starlings more than Cape Canaveral. I have some more obtuse ideas for remixes too but they might stretch the bounds of what I could call music...

credits

released October 11, 2021

Made by Kevin Sorsby.

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all rights reserved

tags

about

Starlings London, UK

ambient experimental no-fi glitch musique concrete noise minimal brutal drone

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