Ryan
Junk is currency and noise is energy. The hum, hiss and drones of machinery are all eternally in earshot, while dripping pipes and deep tones surround. Sometimes rhythms engage like prickled blood; a hammer bouncing the spine. Other times, they swirl and moan, rattle and grind. A marvellous listen.
Includes unlimited streaming of Free Time/Dead Time
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Streaming + Download
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
A reduced price vinyl bundle containing both Left Hand Cuts off the Right's Free Time/Dead Time LP & Degradation's Leadlined LP
Includes unlimited streaming of Free Time/Dead Time
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
Black vinyl LP + insert by artist Simon Moreton. Bundled with 100% Cotton, 160 GSM Brachliegen Organic Tote Bag.
These are heavy duty high quality 160 gsm bags. Long handles with a reinforced cross stitch and a top edge double folded for strength and clean finish. As we say here at Brachliegen: 'heavier than the death of the labour party'.
Includes unlimited streaming of Free Time/Dead Time
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
FREE TIME/DEAD TIME is the first full-length 12" LP from Robbie Judkins’ long-running experimental sound project LEFT HAND CUTS OFF THE RIGHT. The album combines elements of focused minimalism, experimental electronics and twitching musique concrete to create a series of meditative compositions that reflect on the precarious boundaries between labour, leisure, and the quality of lived experience under late-capitalism. Judkins exploratory practice of sonic experimentation invokes the work of Black to Comm, Laaraji, Ashtray Navigations and Kali Malone across its seven dense movements.
A work of minimal composition, frantic energy and sonic collage, FREE TIME/DEAD TIME was created during a transitory phase for Judkins. Emerging in the brief respites between periods of work and non-work, lockdowns, uncertainty and fatigue, the LP mixes live improvisations with composed pieces and experiments for zither, synthesizer, keyboard, field recordings, percussion and effects. The ever-present noise of the grinding machinery of labour encroaches into the sanctity of free time, and is refracted and assembled into a pallet of warped compositions which explore the fragility of the work/life balance. Informed by the politics of post-work theory, FREE TIME/DEAD TIME is a sonic defence of workers’ rights, reflecting the importance of carving out a space for creativity amongst the dirge of the everyday.
Daniel Spicer (The Wire, Jazzwise, The Quietus) observes that “there’s something mysteriously sub-aquatic about the sounds on FREE TIME/DEAD TIME.” For Spicer, the LP exhumes "the submerged snuffling of some forgotten deep-trench dweller, disturbed by the resonating drone of a passing submersible’s propellers, melding distant orca cries with steady motor hum before a final luminescent parade of fragile koto-like plucks.” Judkins pilots the craft as “a lonesome traveller in a metal belly, wrestling with rattle-clatter gears and levers” as “gear-grind metallic buzzing and echoing machinery clangs in the engine chamber.”
Opener ‘Right Kind Of Personality’ clocks in with a plucked rhythm, labouring away on its own schedule. A growl of tension knots itself through the track, as scrapes and bows melancholically intertwine. The dub-noise rattle of ‘Unfortunately’ decays into the industrial experimentation of ‘We’re a Team’, reminiscent of early Nurse With Wound as the termites of capital circle the swirl. ‘Struggle Against Boredom’ closes side A, continuing the journey further into the dank subterranean as zithers mechanically build like boiler room pipes misfiring on contaminated fuel, recalling the juddering rhythms explorations of Drew McDowall
The second side of the LP tentatively steps out from the furnace, with an impressionist series of scrapes subsumed under an avalanche of loose junk noise. A clarity of post-industrial ambiance wrestles away from the cloistering of blanket of tone, with echoes of O Yuki Conjugate assonant from the chaos. ‘That Window’ looks outwards, away from the internal squall with an open zither skipping above a slow sawing bowed drone, harking to Laraaji-style bright expressionism. The beat of rain on the glass leads into the sparse expanse of album closer ‘Dead Time’, which channels the dense minimalism of Kali Malone and Black to Comm through the basement carpark of a terminally recessing British shopping centre. A field recording capturing screeching metal and rattling winds pairs with a dense electrical mist, before glassy FM tones coalesce into a pulsing rhythm. As it all grinds to a halt, recorded malfunctions of machines starved of power in an empty room sit alongside ever thinning electronic drones, reminding you that the stock take needs doing and you stopped being paid 32 minutes ago…
Across seven tracks, FREE TIME/DEAD TIME clashes and melds together sparse melodic cells, dense drones and scrapes of resonant percussion. Rapid strummings through empty workspaces are saturated with a yearning for release: an alternative dimension for the suffocated and distracted subject, degraded for so long by chronic exhaustion, the antic post-shift come down and the machinery of work. The shuddering groans and squealing mechanics of FREE TIME/DEAD TIME are a pointed resistance to the contemporary work-centred society, of which David Frayne observes that “unemployment represents a kind of no-man's land: a dead time, degraded by financial worries, social isolation and stigma.” (David Frayne, ‘The Refusal of Work: The Theory & Practice of Resistance to Work’). As the apparatus of finance clanks and judders to a halt, FREE TIME/DEAD TIME scoops up fragments of life and repurposes them with a utopian animism. Liberated from the social order of production — if but for a moment — a cacophony of tones exhale deep and unencumbered, a boisterous chorus of gurgling unregimented freedom.
credits
released April 14, 2023
Left Hand Cuts off the Right is Robbie Judkins
Mastered by Tasos Stamou
Andrew Page (raxil4) & Unknown other sing on 'Right Kind of Personality' & 'Struggle Against Boredom' (recorded Lewisham Water Tank, 2017)
Less a solo act than a one-man megalith, Khôra builds impressive experimental soundscapes from modular synths, flutes, harps, and more. Bandcamp New & Notable Feb 19, 2020
