Urban Exploration’s AEAEA EP is available for preorder today. Ambient techno and haunted house music mastered by Keith Tenniswood and cut by Curved.
Tower Works. Holbeck Urban Village, Leeds
I’ve written a biography for the Urban Exploration collective, a group of musicians and artists I’ve been part of for 13 years. Where does the time go!
Two moments between phases from The Disappearing City series (2015-2016) by Michael C Coldwell. Now reclad as a Hampton Hotel, this mini tower block lay empty for years on the outskirts of #Leeds city centre - nr Quarry Hill. Formerly British Gas offices the building briefly became Leeds biggest throw up, each window forming a different letter. This #rephoto marks the deconstruction of that giant #graff piece, but some years before the site was redeveloped https://www.instagram.com/p/CqG6bcZohYX/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
The Head Technician showing us how it’s done in #leeds tonight… @dystopian_vectors #pyecorneraudio #sheafstreet #hauntedaudio #slowmotiontechno #drone #industrial #ambient #noise 🖤 https://www.instagram.com/p/CpQ9XmVo7ez/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
THE REMOTE VIEWER (INSTALLATION) MICHAEL C COLDWELL This work presents two different views of a city which no longer exists. Using archive images of Leeds, the installation explores the photograph as representation of loss – the impossibility of time-travel, despite our saturation in pictures and traces of the past. By placing these artefacts back in the scenes in which they came from, the modern city is re-haunted by a change we can no longer fathom, by the scale of urban transformation which has taken place. Two views of the same city are contrasted. Godfrey Bingley’s vision of a bucolic Headingley, just before its rapid urbanisation, and Leeds Corporation’s record of a condemned slum on Quarry Hill. All of the original images used were taken between 1888 and 1910, but the lost cities they represent seem very different – which is not to say they can be easily categorised – urban or rural, rich or poor, heaven or hell. Rephotography usually tries to take exactly the same photo again, so we can compare then with now. But all these locations have transformed beyond recognition, so here the images of past and present cannot be reconciled. In attempting to take the rephotographs anyway, the form deconstructs itself. Further deconstruction is provided by the accompanying sound, recorded at various stages of the image-making: scanning the glass plates, walking the two areas looking for the disappeared streets, and the sound of the camera itself, recording the new views of Leeds. Quarry Hill is being developed again. We can hear the sound of construction in the background, haunting the old images from the future. #hauntological #installation #rephotography #ambient #noise #fieldrecording #spectrality #cityscape #archive #timetravel #lost #projection #lightnight #leeds #videoart https://www.instagram.com/p/Co6qeKxs_a3/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
Music for Installation is out on Monday. This new retrospective is certainly not your typical album. Each track is almost an album in its own right! The material sees CC at his most experimental, stripped back, noisy and immersive. Following on from last year's Music for Documentary Film, this collection gathers together some of Michael C Coldwell's sound art work and music written for exhibition and gallery contexts. https://www.instagram.com/p/CnEaQ2UMIpC/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
c-o-n-f-l-u-x reblogged
Jamming with UE
Tomorrow! #liff https://www.instagram.com/p/Ck2yCdEsJEz/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
Wall and Tree, 2017. Photographic print 16” x 16” from Residuum exhibition, Left Bank Leeds and Failures of Presence photo book (2017) by Michael C Coldwell. “For me the eeriest places are those banal spaces that are almost so ubiquitous we fail to notice them - the eeriness of the car park at night, the empty roof space where no one goes, or the voids left behind when warehouses are demolished” https://www.instagram.com/p/CgCeaeNsbf2/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
Urban Exploration collective ]||| ——- https://urbexmusic.bandcamp.com https://www.instagram.com/p/CcOPULbsbG6/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
Door to nowhere… Willington Power Station (remains) https://www.instagram.com/p/CYZFa-LM2jO/?utm_medium=tumblr
High Street (2020) from Everything is Real. Part of this photography series was published last year in a really interesting arts journal from South Africa, called #herri. The idea came to me when thinking of a way to re-use my urban landscape photography when I couldn’t get out to shoot during the first #lockdown. #changingcity #leeds #architecture #surrealism #reflections #phototheory https://www.instagram.com/p/CT8EpKisBes/?utm_medium=tumblr
Halcyon Towers #armley #leeds #minimalphotography #socialhousing https://www.instagram.com/p/CTocJTfsLVT/?utm_medium=tumblr
Urban Exploration - Terra Incognita - out today on tape and digital… Terra Incognita means unknown territory: an unexplored country or field of knowledge. They used to label blank areas of the map Terra Incognita before the Earth had been fully charted. Few such unknown lands exist in our world today, save for the bottom of the ocean and alien planets beyond our own. However, a place that has not been discovered or that is unknown to the individual, need not be so inaccessible or distant. Strange and inexplicable things can lie hidden just around the corner… Urban Exploration have been making noise for 10 years. This is a landmark release for the Leeds-based group, and their first 'proper' album, working together much more like an experienced and focused band of musicians, than the loose collective of DJs and artists that began improvising and experimenting together, just over a decade ago. Terra Incognita sees the group pushing into uncharted musical territory. The same influences and techniques may be present from earlier releases - techno, folk horror, experimental field recording and radiophonics, exploring post-industrial landscapes, 80s science fiction films etc - but they are no longer separate pastimes vying for sonic attention. On this release they truly coalesce, along with formative memories of earlier electronic music, into something emotional, cinematic, immersive and greater than the sum of its parts. The weird UFO on the cover has its source much closer to home than its form would suggest - the derelict social housing of Sheffield's Park Hill flats. The art and music presented by the group on Terra Incognita, are both indicative of a re-imaginative approach to space and sound, where obsolete objects and discarded forms are transformed into something unusual, gaining new potential when approached from a fresh perspective. see less https://www.instagram.com/p/CSPVVIbsvCF/?utm_medium=tumblr
https://urbexmusic.bandcamp.com/album/terra-incognita
Disused Gasometer from Maquettes of the Invisible City. #lockdownwalks #fog #disused #gasometer #leeds #newtopographics #spectrality https://www.instagram.com/p/CSATZtyMnVq/?utm_medium=tumblr
Urban Exploration started out as a group of DJs, musicians and artists living in Leeds UK, originally brought together through a mutual love of experimental techno, early Warp Records releases, and exploring abandoned buildings and wasteland around Leeds, Sheffield and Birmingham (where several members of the group are originaly from). They have been working together since 2011, but the collective has seen many changes of personnel, different musical styles and creative approaches. Common threads bind all their work together over the last decade, despite this evolution - repurposing obsolete machines, using unorthodox instruments (e.g. pieces of sheet metal, circuit-bent dictaphones, DIY modular), use of improvisation in both performance and composition, processed field recordings, themes of disappearing industry and urban hauntology. As a group they can sometimes seem a little secretive, disappearing themselves for years on end, and then emerging from the Crooked Acres Studio with an unexpected new release or strange live show. For example, in 2012 they improvised with an opera singer utilising a vast derelict flax mill as an echo chamber. Another time they used destroyed pianos as part of an improvised performance. As time has gone on the group has moved further away from their roots in techno and free party culture, via drone and industrial noise, and have now started to work more like an experimental rock band. The electronic elements and references to rave culture are still very much in all their music, but now it feels more like a resurfacing memory emerging from the waves of eerie noise…. Artist bio from the press release for the new Urban Exploration album out on Crooked Acres Records next week http://www.crooked-acres.com/terra_pr.html https://www.instagram.com/p/CR_hfR7skNe/?utm_medium=tumblr