Robin Stewart – Ominous Bath
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Robin Stewart debuts his solo material on the 13th NoCorner cassette – Raw, psychedelic pieces of sound art in the forms of the 28minute ‘And Then’ and it’s counterpart ‘Ominous Bath’.

Robin is our long time peer and by no means a new figure in Bristol’s art & electronic scenes, having recently taken his acute techno punk to the world as one half of Giant Swan, whilst continuing to break up borders between electronic and live music with The Naturals band, as well as creating artwork for a number of exhibitions and commissions such as El Kid’s ‘Labyrinths Ep’ (one of our first releases back in 2012) as well as the cover for this release.

Fitting somewhere in between musique concrete, drone and, in his own words ‘the sounds that emanate from living in blissful solitude’, we found that these descriptions weren’t enough, and the best way to experience this music, was… Well, to experience it.

So we sent one of our explorers down the hole…

They returned after a while, with these words recorded into their Tascam:

“Enter the room, the centre of everything, in the middle of nowhere.

Moving at an undistinguishable pace, it feels as though the master clockwork itself can be challenged by entering the perimeters of this sonic field, stretched out into the strangest of new worlds, one foot still here, the other pulling towards that alluring light beaming out behind the creaks of that heavy wooden door, which is moving in unexplained ways.

Those distant sirens enter through the cracks above the curtains, lighting up the room like a desperate flare shot from a boat that has not long departed. In fact, if you take a minute, you will realise that the whole room is shapeshifting increasingly with each cycle of sound, like a circus of mechanised organisms, or like a fairground at night, on standby with only the ghosts of human joy residing in this place.

Indistinguishable forms of reality and obscured imagination are forming a kind of play with the senses. It’s hard to figure out what is creating this increasing, unstoppable momentum. Could it be the woozy, warm bass that is rumbling beneath the floorboards, whilst the open electric snakes it’s way across the ceiling in blue & white shapes, leaving concise trails of dark, charcoal smoke falling weightlessly above us? And who is operating these mechanics that whir around us? Is it something to do with the voices from outside? It feels too late to leave, too soon to go.

Time and our judgement of the surroundings are becoming harder to track, who knows how many times this door has opened itself to us now, gradually exposing that blinding light which momentarily changes the shape of our space into something wholly new, unexplainable.

Just before the door falls back into the void, these sharp lights play a dance with the blackest of shadows, and all options present themselves with new vigour once more. This is the moment in which we realise that we needed this delirium all along, we had been searching for it… The sound of solitary bliss, the sound that only exists with you”.