serial consign

This weekend a communique announcing a new release on Audiobulb Records ended up in the Serial Consign inbox. The project, entitled 1 | Favourite Places, is a compilation of "audio portraits" of specific locations from around the world as collected and interpreted by several artists including Leafcutter John, Taylor Deupree and Biosphere. Each of the contributing artists have captured field recordings from a place of their choosing and composed a piece of music around their site-specific aural fragments. This in and of itself isn't revolutionary as there is no shortage of field recording-based projects, but the overall design vision for the compilation is quite noteworthy.

1 | Favourite Places is supplemented with an interactive microsite (pictured above) which allow you to geo-locate the place that inspired each piece of music, hear the source field recordings and read brief statements from each of the artists. This flash based site is quite tasteful (i.e. no gratuitous animation) and exploring the interface definitely captures the spirit of the release. It is beyond the scope of this post to talk about accessibility and web standards, but it is worth mentioning that I had to use Safari to view the site as Firefox on OS X wouldn't work. This grievance aside, I enjoyed the piece and it definitely piqued my interest about the compilation. Beyond that (and at the risk of sounding nostalgic), I haven't seen any album specific interactive pieces like this since the heyday of Force Inc.

The microsite was designed by Andy Newman in response to the album design and packaging which was handled by Stereographic. I haven't heard Favourite Places yet but the March issue of Textura weighed in with a positive review of the compilation. It appears this release is to be the first of a series as Audiobulb has already posted a call for work for the next edition of the project.

[ruin / audiobulb fz-bulb / 2007]

1 | Favourite Places inspired some exploration of the main Audiobulb site and the label does appear to live up to its self-described interest in "Exploratory Electronic Music". The Sheffield-based imprint is run by David Newman and has been releasing ambient and experimental music since 2003. In cruising around the site it was great to see that the label is not only promoting a solid back catalog but a selection of VSTs, patches and even some hardware. Outside of overplayed discussions about distribution, it is not too often that you see a small independent record label thinking outside of the box so respect must be given where it is due. Keep an eye on this label!