Some pro photographs from last years Horse Hospital gig by Simon Fernandez.

http://www.simonfernandezphotography-archive.com/Music-Photogra/Sarah-Angliss-and-Time/i-v7cRKsG

Review by Pseudoscientific World of TomTit

Original post here:
http://tomtittery.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/the-great-attender.html?spref=fb

Saturday, 16 August 2014
THE GREAT ATTENDER

This gentleman is Paul Snowdon, an artist and musician who records under the name of Time Attendant. His new album, Bloodhounds, has been on the TOMTIT turntable and various mobile devices for weeks now, and is only just beginning to give up its mysteries.
For us, most modern electronic albums seem either glacial and ungiving or too eager to be liked, but 'Bloodhounds' bucks the trend by being a very warm, but affably ambiguous record.

Sometimes it sounds like a partially unspooled techno tape, but it also evokes Henk Badings or Tom Dissevelt or Tristam Cary and the other greats of the post war electronic music scene. Mostly, it provides the soundscape and lets the listener provide the landscape: unlike many 21st century projects the artwork and song titles don't make it clear what you are supposed to hear, to think, to feel, to enjoy, to 'get'. Instead, Paul concentrates on intriguing and baffling and exciting the ear with a huge panoply of fascinating made noises, found sounds, field recordings, bleeps, bloops, swoops and swipes and then leaves the rest up to you. We think we identified a colony of bats leaving a cave at one point, but it might equally have been a mouse in a trap or a squeaky ducking stool.

As an example of the immersive qualities of this superb record, Unmann-Wittering was listening to it just yesterday whilst wandering around a branch of W.H Smith, and was so transfixed by the closing track ('Fuchsia Circles') that he became dangerously over stimulated and spent £18 on stationary he didn't need and £31.75 on magazines, including one about military modelling, a pursuit he hasn't been interested in since the late eighties.
Get it here, but for pity's sake be careful.

Posted by TOMTIT at 00:00:00

Review by Chuck Foster for The Big Takeover

Original post here:
http://www.bigtakeover.com/recordings/time-attendant-bloodhounds-lp-exotic-pylon

Time Attendant - Bloodhounds LP (Exotic Pylon)25 July 2014
by Chuck Foster
After a series of highly regarded EPs, London-based artist/musician, Paul Snowdon, AKA Time Attendant, finally delivers his astonishing debut album. 

Bloodhounds explores the possibilities of electronic composition by drawing from experimentalists such as Pan-Sonic, Autechre and Squarepusher, as well as the heavily composed music of Klaus Schulzeand Tangerine Dream. In seamlessly combining the two very different approaches, Snowdon creates visceral soundscapes from field recordings, rhythmic noises and electronic melodies, ultimately crafting three-dimensional soundscapes where all senses become heightened. These musical realms build tactile places, conjuring memories of touch, taste and smell feeding into sound and sight for a truly virtual experience. “Flashy Pointer,” for example, begins with seaside air, which calmly brings in a bit of synthesized jazz before striking forward on a cold Berlin school march. It’s an album constructed from so many influences that mere labels cannot accurately describe the style. 

The most groundbreaking albums hit without a moment’s notice, making Bloodhounds a serious contender in the world of experimental electronics. Only time will tell its influence, but, for now, Time Attendant has entirely stolen the show. The next release can’t come soon enough.

J. Simpsons review of Bloodhounds for Freq.

Original post here:
http://freq.org.uk/reviews/time-attendant-bloodhounds/


Time Attendant – Bloodhounds Exotic Pylon

Bloodhounds is folk poetry. Paul Snowdon is reclaiming the machines of technology from the cultural elite, the bright and polished megastar DJs and superslick mnml producers, ensconced in their citadels of expensive outboard effects, to create a rural ritual evocation of a youth spent in northern England.

Let’s look at that word: folk. As in, of the people. As in, opposed to academic or art-house music. It’s the things that you hear around you; your actual life and environment. Folk songs are routinely associated with a particularly region, a dialect, a strain of people and their daily lives. Still, when most people think about it, they think about heritage festivals and “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore”, disassociating from their own lives, their own traditions (or lack thereof).

The thing about folk music is that everybody can do it. Everybody DOES do it. Whether it’s the sounds of a whistling postman or a synchronized group of postal stampers in Thailand, folk music is the sound of the collective, of the everyday, OF THE PEOPLE. I trace this strand of folk avant-garde to the works of AMM, Cornelius Cardew and Keith Rowe, who attempted to blend microtonal jamming, broken equipment, alleatoric practices and socialist principles to simulate a sound in tune with the environment around them.

Snowdon seems to be employing a blend of vintage synthesizers, dusted drum machines, hand-soldered oscillators and tape-machines to create a rural techno symphony. This is the sound of someone growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, wandering dawn dark country lanes to go to the city and go to a rave or a punk show. Perhaps they were listening to the KLF orAphex Twin while walking down farm lanes lined with ditches. Those sonics layer right on top of the folk traditionals and the land itself. So, in a way, this could be seen as a ritualistic, trance-inducing dub techno take on Elgar‘s The Dream Of Gerontius, an attempt to evoke a landscape.

We must never forget that Aphex Twin was from Cornwall, and we wonder how much those hedgerows and bramble bushes contributed to the alien landscapes of Selected Ambient Works II. Because you can hear a similar type of alien sheen in Time Attendant‘s music, particularly on “Nettle Sting Riddle,” which attempts to transplant SAW II back in Cornwall soil, as neon candescent northern lights are wrapped in field recordings of crashing through long grass. Of course, the ghost of the Radiophonic Workshop looms large in the British mindscape as a collective imagining of the future and Paul Snowdon seems to evoke that with a variety of hand-built oscillators which produce eerie, de-tuned gliding auras that instantly conjures images of flying saucers and outer space. Boomkat called it “an earthbound sci-fi expose of the mud and stone beneath our feet.”

In that same text, Paul Snowdon talked about “recovering from a rural northern upbringing by eking out a liminal existence across south east London bunkers.” So this is the sound of coming to grips and exploring where you come from, coming to grips with who you are. A number (most? all?) of Bloodhounds‘ tracks seem to be loop-based, repetitious and jam-oriented,feeding disassociated drum samples and field recordings into a cavernous dub-echo techno soup that brings to mind the whirling dervish noise hypnosis of a Wolf Eyes live gig. The thing with jam-based repetition and trance is that it is a collective ritual, that everybody can take part. The drum circle does not exclude, and it is not trying to go anywhere. It rides like waves, happy and content all night long and rapturous epiphanies can be produced. Tremendous musicians can rise out of these collective environments (perhaps that’s the ONLY place they rise out of), as you can play and play and play, and eventually learn how to be a musician. So it breaks down to the dichotomy of composed vs. improvised, and sometimes people who compose will only take scripted music seriously.

So that’s where the rock star divide comes from. Obviously the super-polished DJ must come from somewhere, learning his tricks and her trade, as we all do. But there seems to be a negative attitude towards improvised music, “just fucking around”, “don’t know what they’re doing.” Some people just don’t know how to listen to exploratory music and only value polished product. That being said, some of the material on Bloodhounds is quite polished and through-composed, particularly album opener “Ermine Fever” with its stacks and layers of light, fluttering nearly jazzy rhythms swathed in gray fog. There is a mixture of finished, proper productions, which would work in a club — if a DJ were cool enough to play this kind of thing — and then there are a number of jams, which sound like Time Attendant getting to know his machines; his rickety rhythm boxes and wheezing organs.

All in all, Bloodhounds finds Time Attendant taking stock on his past, and his present, and aiming for the future. This is the sound of a journey and an evolution of an artist, growing from the mud and roots of a rural environment into the world of technology. Snowdon reminds us to be where we are, to come from where we come from, to know ourselves, and explore our individual roots and pathways.

Bloodhounds is a right and proper album, a total immersive journey that will take you through bramble patches and tall grass, through cavernous vampire casinos and into the pea soup mist. People that like handmade electronica like Ekoplekz and Hacker Farm have a new jewel in their crown, and should get this immediately. It’s Time Attendant’s finest work yet, and a high point for Jonny Mugwump‘s abstract Exotic Pylon transmissions.
-J Simpson-

Photo's from the Windmill in Brixton gig by M.Zombini.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/97876561@N04/sets/72157645222729279/

Raisedbygypsies on Bloodhounds.

http://raisedbygypsies.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/mp3-review-time-attendant-blood-hounds.html

8 stars from Norman Records for Bloodhounds LP.

https://www.normanrecords.com/records/147946-time-attendant-bloodhounds-

8/10 from Mike (Staff) on 11 July 2014
I was somewhat dreading listening to this because I was told "I think it's going to be noisy soundscapes" when it was handed to me. I'm relieved to discover that isn't really the case at all. This is strange and deeply psychedelic lo-fi electronics from Paul Snowdon, aka Time Attendant, a broken but strangely intriguing sound sort of like if Hacker Farm smoked a load of bongs and tried to do something cosmic and uplifting but it went a bit west.


There's strange stumbling percussive loops, spooky field recordings of footsteps and babbling water and mysterious machinery paired with ominous synth whooshes aplenty, plus some occasional vocal textures that are echoed and blurred into babbling smudges. It moves between moods and textures quite a lot but rarely in a harsh and overpowering way. I'm particularly liking the spaced out spook-dub throb of 'Inky's Pitch' and the weird robotic fanfares of 'Flashy Pointer' on first listen but there's so much going on throughout the LP that you'll keep coming back to it just trying to get your head round its baffling quirks.

Review of Bloodhounds by includemeout blog.

'your brain is bound to get chewed up in the cogs'

Original post is here:
http://includemeout2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/time-attendant-bloodhounds-exotic-pylon.html?spref=fb


Friday, 27 June 2014

Time Attendant - Bloodhounds (Exotic Pylon)
From Sun Ra's cosmic keyboard thrashing on Gods Of The Thunder Rain (Live At Montreux) to Time Attendant's Ermine Fever, that was my sonic experience this morning and the two were quite compatible. Afro future past, analogue future present - they're linked by different approaches to percussive rhythm, the natural and mechanical/sampled. Sun Ra is partial to a chant, but whoever is saying what cannot be understood on Ermine Fever adds to the the mystery and atmosphere (like a lost soul in space crying out to be saved).

(Is that link tenuous? Possibly.)

Paul Snowdon always avoids falling into the ghostly-by-numbers trap and this record is no exception. Nettle Sting Riddle conjures up the spirit in the machine without resorting to spook cliché; packed with small details, layered ethereal textures of twilight twinkling, field samples and tormented equipment. Inky's Patch has a basic dub-style template which in the hands of others would be just that with whizzy effects, but what Snowdon adds to the background colour on this canvas exceeds what most mortals would imagine. The simplest of melodies is warped with varying bass tones, subtle echo and swooping electronic punctuation.

Horses, horses! There's one on here (Flashy Pointer). And a barking dog. Many samples (?) and field recordings are buried in the mix. The mix is everything. The composition, if you like, if that's not lending it too much weight. I don't think so. Snowdon does compose and in that he's a rarity amongst modern electronic music makers. Without exactly being radical and sometimes using simple beats, he still pieces together tracks that continue to present previously unheard components upon replaying. Bloodhounds may not get into top gear speed-wise, but as some tracks chug along your brain is bound to get chewed up in the cogs of Snowdon's cunning mechanics.

Review of Bloodhounds by ears4eyes blog.

"a musical version of Marcel Duchamp's 'Nude Descending a Staircase'"

Click the link to view the original post.

http://ears4eyes.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/time-attendant-bloodhounds-exotic-pylon.html?m=1

Wednesday, 16 July 2014
Time Attendant - Bloodhounds (Exotic Pylon)
Echoing bloop-fugue drift album ‘Bloodhounds’ is the debut long-form release from Paul Snowdon in the guise of shuffling synthotist Time Attendant. It follows several excellent EPs for More than Human and Exotic Pylon records.

Atmospheric and evocative of experiences you haven't had, it is steeped in the weird and uncanny. The music is deeply odd, but not the alien oddness of cold machine process; there are clearly hands at these dials, switches and wires; what those hands are connected to I wouldn't like to guess. ‘Nettle Sting Riddle’ is a drum pad beat in thick moss, a drummer boy separated from his troop in a thickly fogged endless meadow; suffused with a weird internal logic that defies easy unpacking. ‘Sugar Beet Perfume’ deploys pitch-bent guitar noise and a precarious beat patterned around interlocking rusted wheels. The frog-chorus of weirdly phased and overlapping electro-croaks on ‘Inky’s Pitch’ is combined with small bubbles of bass and static. ‘Crystal Mascot’ mixes the gentle clumping thwok of wood chime and crushed bird-song with hazy drones and bleep-melodies in a frame of hissing tick-rhythms that speed and slow like a broken record player.

Sounds pile on sounds in unlikely serrated blocks, a dada assemblage that is challenging to make sense of. The answer is to not; it is what it is, and that is remarkable enough. Spun together with human ingenuity but warped with garden-shed-bound lunatic urges; the album often resembles a brain where neurons must fire across weed-choked drainage canals. With ‘Bloodhounds’ Time Attendant presents a noise-world runny around the edges, its modular-synth gravitational core a shifting kaleidoscope of trumpets, horses, voices, passing trains – a parade of almost-shapes smashed into non-linearity, a musical version of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’; a paradoxical mix of motion and mind-consuming self-examination, the forward drive of ‘Bloodhounds’ is frequently distracted by bizarre road-side monoliths.

Time Attendant’s recent live performance at London’s Brixton Windmill saw him at one point channelling the motorik chug of Neu. The smooth glide along endless utopic Autobahns was suddenly diverted onto Ballard’s Westway, a crash expelling Snowdon onto a concrete island where he patches together synths from wind-blown crisp packets, crushed Coke cans and the occasional whirling hubcap. Growing old with a squirrel in each pocket of his dirty overcoat, he plays infinite sets of broken techno to a menagerie of rat skulls, urban foxes and stranded badgers; the music almost entirely lost in the constant roar of traffic.
Michael Holland at 09:07