Otherworld / Time Binding Ensemble
Kay Logan is a multi-disciplinary artist, instrumentalist and sound engineer from Airdrie, now living in Glasgow. Her guitar and bass work in sweaty, thrashing outfits like Herbert Powell and Anxiety are an inverse corollary to the curious tapestries in which Helena Celle, Otherworld and Time Binding Ensemble shape. The preternatural stylistic sensibility Logan exhibits in all of her work isn’t limited to sound, either – she’s a prodigious visual artist with the kind of signature sartorial sensibility that could launch a thousand ships, or lookalikes.
In 2021 we were lucky enough to bring Kay's alchemic neo-classical project, Time Binding Ensemble, to vinyl for the first time. Nothing New Under the Sun arrives in 24 parts of equal length, the collection cycling through each key of the musical scale before returning to its starting point, like a sundial etching sound from shadows cast throughout a day and night.
Inspired by the crumbling brutalism of St. Peter's Roman Catholic seminary in her native Scotland, Logan employs traditional instruments (french horn, bassoon, clarinet, oboe, violin, viola, and cello) fed through otherworldly machines to imbue them with a heavy-lidded, sacred geometry. An Escherian stairwell of a record.
Then, four years on since the portal to Kay Logan's Otherworld creaked open for the first time, we were able to sit back and admire Mad Wee Light in newly remastered form. Committed to both black and white vinyl editions, her masterpiece glows like a restored AI generated painting, binary scrubbed and winding with fractal strangeness towards its core.
Praise for Otherworld, from Boomkat:
Stunning, perfectly zonked and secretive drone visions from Kay Logan’s Otherworld for her Anxiety bandmate Michael Kasparis’ ever-surprising Night School - a real shout for fans of Zoviet France, Two Daughters, Coil, Kevin Drumm
A lowkey jaw-dropper ... The music is really of the rarest drone ambient ilk, spun from real instruments and tape loops with a sort of supernatural, atavistic and prelinguistic quality that gets us slack jawed and heavy-lidded in the most special way.
Spanning tracts of scudding windswept ambience recalling the lushest sort of loopy ambient regressions of Zoviet France, to rawly Scelsi-esque one note drone intensities and the kind of acidic didgeridoo scapes Coil would dream of, Otherworld is making exactly the kind of quietly immanent, life-affirming, expansive musick that we need right now...