Llyr

“Forever infatuated by the natural world and its complexity, I wanted to travel to one of most biodiverse places on Earth and allow myself to be guided by what I found there. I spent three weeks exploring the rainforest in Borneo, bringing a small collection of electronic gear to this unforgiving recording environment, and captured as many moments as I could, trying to keep one step ahead of the noisy crickets and humidity. When I returned, I used the resulting sound library to create these pieces.”
– Llyr

1. Refuge of Majesty
2. Chorus of the Insects
3. Winged Chamber Music
4. Courtship Signal
5. Intrusion #509
6. The Hawthorne Effect
7. Interject
8. Encroachment

Constructed from a library of sounds collected by the artist in the rainforests of Borneo, Llyr’s debut album is an expansive documentation of natural beauty and human interference.

Biome 12″ Eco-Vinyl with double-sided printed art insert available for pre-order now via Bandcamp and selected stores.

– 180g heavyweight vinyl
– Made using recycled pellets
– All card used is FSC certified and sustainable

Art and design in collaboration with Colin Droz

In the short art piece ‘Unfurl’, Flora Macleod’s intricate visual sculpture is paired with ‘Chorus of the Insects’, an organic ambient drone music composition from Llyr’s album ‘Biome’.

Unfurl is a response to Iris van Herpen’s open brief ‘Collaboration Creates Community’. Informed by IVH’s ‘Roots of Rebirth’ collection, we are taken on a tour of singular mushroom, which we discover via a sequence of fleeting glimpses. It finally spreads, unfurls and releases its spores just as its full form is revealed. The sonic counterpart is equally organic: created entirely from manipulated and layered recordings of insects collected in the rainforests of Borneo.

Interject is about human sonic interruptions in an otherwise serene environment. There are few quiet places left on the planet, and the rainforest is no exception. You might hear planes flying overhead, speed boats in the distance, saws, voices. Noisy humans are everywhere.

The basis of the track is a recording of frogs in a swamp in Kubah National Park. If you listen carefully, you can hear a point where I was, unwittingly, that noisy human. The track also includes a layer of human voice (from Sean Philips of Private Agenda) on top of the sounds synthesised from my manipulated recordings.

Surging AI hallucinations depict the delicate interplay between nature’s serene environment and the potential destruction that human civilization can bring about when left unchecked in AI art expert Xander Steenbrugge’s video for The Hawthorne Effect.

Employing Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Xander feeds his custom AI model a curated collection of thousands of images from pristine rainforests to various examples of human interference in natural environments (logging, forest fires, oil rigs…) and lets it dream.

The rain had just stopped after a three day torrential downpour and we were sitting in the outdoor kitchen area in a longhouse on an organic farm on the outskirts of the rainforest. It was early evening and we were eating under the light of a simple lamp. A large insect flew up behind me, attracted to the light, and then another, and then another… Before we knew it we were in the middle of a swarm of insects. Before dashing for cover I quickly turned on my recorder, which was sat on its tripod, and recorded the inside of the swarm.

The Hawthorne Effect is created from the recording of this swarm. It’s an unsettling warning sound – a reminder that it is up to us to moderate our impact and try to ensure a peaceful co-existence with nature.

The Official Video for Winged Chamber Music is a collaboration with creative coder vvz3n.

Featuring a simulation of a cave created from more than a million points of light, and spread over 7100 frames, the audiovisual piece guides you into the depths, highlighting the fragility of life inside.

Experience vvz3n’s illustration of this majestic cathedral, which teems with life and light until the organisational structures of nature are broken down.

Winged Chamber Music is the first single from Biome, an expansive documentation of natural beauty and human interference.

Winged Chamber Music is made entirely from field recordings captured inside a cave in Sarawak. The artwork, a collaboration between the artist and Colin Droz, features a photograph taken inside the cave where the recordings were captured.

Experience: shifting scenes with trains thundering past; teleportation into a futuristic virtual reality headphone rave; and an escape to a digital dream-like state. Llyr presents music created using a mixture of binaural recordings captured of an eerily daunting present-day London by award-winning sound designer Will Cohen and a series of personal answer phone recordings left for him by Crystal Tassels, a renowned burlesque singer from the Berlin performance art underground.