Left Hand Cuts off the Right - Free Time/Dead Time (Vinyl LP)
https://brachliegentapes.bandcamp.com/album/free-time-dead-time
[pre-order, ships 14th April 2023]
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.”