Tim Coster - Star Mill
CLaudi_015
CDR
New solo recordings, three long drone pieces over 37 minutes. Made from layered instrument, object, & field recordings.
Recorded March - July 2007, using bass guitar, ocarina, accordian, bells, harmonica, mbira, cloves, bottles, bowls, alarm clock, wood and string.
REVIEWS:
"Coster also recently released the stunning Star Mill, a 37-minute three-track (or one-track-in-three-parts) EP that's probably the best work he's done yet. As with past releases Landing and Rowboat/Blackberry, Coster uses the laptop to manipulate and layer his field recordings into langurous stretches of humid, trance-inducing ambient tones. The imperceptibility of his sources infuses these untitled pieces with delicate ambiguity, which in turn
allows them to develop very visual qualities. The first track begins its epic 20-minute voyage with some faint clicking and tapping, then a sustained hum, then what sounds like an incoming ship's horn. 5 minutes in, glass harp-like slivers seep into the web, with Coster continually shifting and tweaking things to create an intensely warm, womb-like shroud of sound. It eventually ends with a bright clearing, the emergence of life: cars driving by, chiming birds, and something squeaking in the distance. It's just another sublime puzzle piece to Coster's immersive, quietly grand design." Aaron Yapp - REAL GROOVE MAGAZINE
"If Tim Coster's Star Mill is another reprise of the whole 'Haunt me (do it again)' imperative that regulates a lot of environmental drone at the moment, then it certainly digs a little deeper in its archaeological, three-movement 'float' through the spectral confines of its eponymous milieu. Whether explored as an allegorical thoroughfare for Coster's acoustic reverie, or occupied as a material repository for his field-based, local prospect, the site of the work's title provides the Auckland artist and Claudia label leader with a warmly matutinal genius loci for his composed sojourn, and he invokes a lush, phantom humming from the grain of an otherwise mute framework, with the assistance of assorted, musical detritus: bass guitar, ocarina, accordion, bells, harmonica, mbira, cloves, bottles, bowls, alarm clock, wood and string. If the mill remains in that transitional interstice between the industrial and information economies, then Coster also functions at a liminal, outwardly moribund threshold between analogue and digital production, but he galvanizes it as a contiguous, resonant space, creating a fruitful locus for engaging repose. It's fittingly galactic. Like Requiem for Barseb?k, Jacob Kirkegaard's audio documentation of the abandoned nuclear power plant in Sweden in 2005, Coster's work amplifies the hushed polyphony of what Tim Edensor calls the 'ghosts of industrial ruins', spilling colour through the saturnine fissures of what appears on the CD cover as a fairly dull chiaroscuro. By furnishing a defunct space with what could be the ethereal draft of a pure sort of ventilation, Star Mill is supplied with a timbral relief so absent from the planar realm of what we indolently name ambient music. Peripheral traffic noise, normally a b?e noire down on the phonographic scene, segues the tripartite piece into its second section, orientating the listener in a new sonic locale, subtly added to the sound of a moaning conveyer belt which suggests that not all is lifeless around here just yet. As Joanna Lumley remarks un-cannily on her second assignment in Sapphire & Steel, the air at the abandoned railway station indicates midsummer but it's really mid-October, typifying a temporal disjunction so present in Star Mill. But things are neither malevolent nor benevolent in the latter work, and that is Coster's quiet forte, resisting both ghostly faux pas and euphoric coloratura in his textural meditation, eschewing the suggestive tropes that pop up too often in other quarters of the putative genre." Shannon O'Brien JOHN DORY REPORT
"Drone works seem to be plentiful these days. I've always had a difficult time estimating the relative size of our little community. It seems that as the years pass, the number of new projects grows geometrically, so one can only assume that the listener base undergoes a similar reaction. Digital audio software advances in a similar fashion, making the listener immediately into the performer with only a modicum of effort and investment. Online magazines, such as this one, serve more to measure the incalculable release schedule of bedroom labels than to further discourse on musical methodology. By writing this review, I've also made a seemingly fixed record of a limited audio document's existence. Strictly utilitarian, right? (And also with the faintest tinge of rabid consumerism?It affects us worse than most.) On bad days, complete pessimism overwhelms me as I contemplate the apparent futility in trying to document the scene or promote a release that most people will never hear (or care to hear) no matter what glowing terms spill across the telephone wire. But then, something like "Star Mill" shows up in my mailbox.
Possessing New Zealander citizenship should seem a clich?in this day in age for outsider music (are we still outsiders?), but here's yet another entry in what should be an invasion, Tim Coster. I'm under the impression that he's primarily a laptop performer, blending field recordings and other audio sources. I tend to associate that technique with glacial precision at its best, and sterile stillness at its nadir. "Star Mill" feels a bit different. On this three-track, thirty-seven-minute excursion, we truly get the best of two competing aesthetics?sophisticated digital and (at least the feel) of workman analog. As the opening breathless salvos roll in, the desired sound-realm could either be the murky oak forest hiding demonic familiars or the last moments of fried antiquarian hardware. If I stare at the cover art, I suddenly hear the creaking of the pictured waterwheel, along with the spectres floating above the broken floorboard into the ephemeral night. What makes this recording breath are the milliseconds of "imperfections" that break the digital gloss, turning it into something alive and fragile (and not just a preprogrammed exercise). Normally, I listen to subtle drone musics while working. "Star Mill" never fails to make me lose my concentration. Now, I need to get back to what I should be doing. Beyond recommended. 9/10 "
FOXY DIGITALIS
"The name Tim Coster has popped up before in these virtual pages. He is from those islands down under that are so isolated that if they want to hear experimental music, it's easier to make it themselves than buying import records. So everyone seems to be making music down there. A lot of people from New Zealand play in bands, but there is also a bunch of people who create music through laptops, such as Richard Francis, Mark Sadgrove and Tim Coster. 'Star Mill' is one, thirty-seven minute, piece (in what I believe to be three parts) of music that starts out with some rain like sounds, and from there on things grow with great intensity, building, adding, building, adding. Layer upon layer, until a thick and heavy thunder cloud arises out of which sparks and thunder are discharged. Heavy duty drone music at work. To quite an extent in the field of digital processing, this one, and also more topheavy than some of the other drone workers. Which sets Coster quite nicely apart from the rest of the lot, which is great." VITAL WEEKLY