S U N S H I N E H A S B L O W N

Cdr from Musicyourmindwillloveyou (mymwly0048)

gorgeous solar aquatic noise scapes from this Joel Stern and Adam Park led ensemble, weaving tones amongst abstract structures...electric, meyeopic, static, streams of image noise like pictures...good to grow

packaged in beautiful textured paper with inner sleeve artwork by velvet pesu...

1. Governor's House Brisbane 25th November 05
2. Mormon Gibbon Brisbane 19th Feb 06
3. Muji Judith Wright Centre Brisbane 19th December 05
4. Governor's House Brisbane 25th November 05

joel stern (1,2,3,4) – electronics, violin, guitar, mbira, trumpet, objects
adam park (1,2,3,4) – reel to reel tapes, electronics
velvet pesu (2) – cello, mbira, percussion
joe musgrove (3) – turntable, voice, objects
scott sinclair (3) – drums, voice, pc

edited and mastered by Joel at Governor's House March 2006.
Thanks salad, michael, collage planning, raffael, wilhelm, jeremy, noble, deadnotes.....

download it...

Packaged in hand-made paper that looks like animal hide, this is a lovely disc from Joel Stern-led Sunshine Has Blown. Sounds seem to emerge from an inky blackness like little bubbles of light, unrecognisable tones rung from instruments such as cello, thumb piano, violin, guitar, percussion. Lovely stuff. - Boa Melody Bar

reviewed in 'outer limits' by Sam Davies October 2006

This record may take a while for some listeners. What may at first seem like a disjointed collection of ramshackle sonic events will reveal its peculiar internal logic on repeated listens. This is a very strange and understated album, but one with deep rewards for the patient among us.

Sunshine Has Blown is the duo of Joel Stern and Adam Park aided by various sound carriers from Brisbane, Australia. Each piece was recorded live and titled after the venue at which they were recorded. The instrumentation is a mix of acoustic instruments (most notably the mbira) and unobtrusive electronics. Park’s tape loops add pre-recorded elements to the mix which call to mind a more rustic version of Smegma.

Despite the fact that this is most definitely experimental music, it has a sort of indefinable old world charm to it. It is almost as though all these beautiful sounds were constructed with junk from the attic of deceased estate. At times it sounds like a beautifully haphazard collision of old music boxes and ragtime records played backwards. Track 3 sounds like wandering into an abandoned seaside town to find the Ferris wheel still turning after sixty years.

Like labelmates Brothers of the Occult Sisterhood, SHB buck current trends in experimental music by going for spaciousness rather than heavy blocks of sound or drone. Each player’s contribution is clearly audible in the mix. Such an approach could lead to a sense of aimlessness, but what SHB lack in propulsion they make up for with sheer sonic interestingness. The listener is free to wander amongst the sounds on this disc, stopping to focus on whatever happens to catch their attention.

If you’re anything like me you’ll wander happily for hours in the confines of this beguiling music. 9/10 -- Cola Nitida (13 February, 2007) - Foxy Digitalis

>>> Avant-psychedelia collaboration between local sound artists
Recently released by prolific sound collective Music Your Mind Will Love You (home to Brothers of the Occult Sisterhood, Terracid, 6Majik9, et al), Sunshine Has Blown documents a collaboration between Brisbane experimental artists Adam Park and Joel Stern. In partnership with Joe Musgrove, Scott Sinclair and Velvet Pesu's string, percussive, vocal and processing contributions; Park and Stern on Sunshine Has Blown have created a subtle aural voyage, with its four tracks exploring sonic elements including tape loops (both contemporary and antiquated), bursts of static, haunting piano, musique concrete elements and understated drones. Park and Stern's contributions are both of utmost importance to Sunshine Has Blown; with the space and respect the pair allow each other's input resulting in seamless waves of sound. Lovingly housed within painstakingly created packaging and released as a limited edition release, Sunshine Has Blown is a valuable document of experimental music unfettered by the demands of commerce. 4 stars out of 5
ANDREW TUTTLE - Rave Magazine August 1-7th 2006:

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Sunshine Has Blown review in Bagatellen
by Brian Olewnick

Crowd sounds, an insistent ratchet, harsh metallic rubbing. Still, the initial impression one gets from the opening track here is one of tonality. Roundabout, perhaps, but you're pretty sure it's going to get there—except that it doesn't, not quite. It teeters, giddily if not drunkenly, on a thin edge between repeated, backwards tape loops and a low thrum of possibly guitar-ish origin on the one side and blithely diffident noise on the other. The listener is almost forced to imagine a physical location, maybe some strange arcade, where the host of simultaneous and contradictory sounds can be reconciled, Fascinating, unbalancing music, this.
Sunshine Has Blown is an initiative led by Joel Stern along with Adam Park. The latter supplies the almost omnipresent tape manipulation while Stern divides time between electronics, guitar, trumpet, violin, mbira and other objects. The four performances are from live events in late 2005 and early 2006 during which they were occasionally joined by Velvet Pesu (cello, mbira, percussion), Joe Musgrave (turntable, voice, objects) and Scott Sinclair (drums, voice, percussion). They're rather unique. (I should also make mention of the lovely cover, printed on a delicate, tissue-y paper wrapped around a matte black sleeve).
The second piece sounds, at its start, like an unknown tape from the "Bitches Brew" sessions that's been sitting in a basement puddle for several decades. Fugitive, vaguely funky bass thwomps, scatter-spray trumpet and ultra-low bowed string growls are all smeared under a grimy film. This gradually morphs into thumb piano and reverse tape, suction-y sounds that cast a slightly warped gamelan spell before—what was that? —some Venusian lounge band? Ah, it seems Sun Ra has entered the premises. Didn't see the rings. There's no sure footing here despite the relative easiness on the ears; everything's in dream logic.
This oneiric rambling continues into the next cut, shards of hazy cocktail piano placed among the constant backtracking tape blips fading in and out amidst static and subaqueous mbiras. It's murky and eerie, reminding me a little bit of the feel imparted by Bryars' "The Sinking of the Titanic" in its submergence of music that's almost banal (at one point you hear a sequence that's uncomfortably close to the first five notes of "What the World Needs Now") within an a-musical brew. The final work contains some backwards tape with a slightly march-like cadence that recalls "Are You Experienced?", an unsettling referent in this context. Whether or not it succeeds in suspending the listener's sense of disbelief is the question. I wavered back and forth, the first track being by far the most convincingly hallucinatory, though all four pieces have their moments and plenty of them.

Sunshine Has Blown manages to sound like nothing else I've heard recently, an unusual enough achievement. It's engaging, awkward, troubling and thought-provoking. In other words, check it out.

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Sunshine Has Blown review in Paris Transatlantic
by LE

The suburbs of Brisbane, one of Australia's northern and most tropical capital cities, often produce strangely intoxicating sonic fruits and this edition offers some recent blooms from a few local emerging crops. A combined effort of Adam Park and Joel Stern (with additional sounds from Velvet Pesu, Joe Musgrove and Scott Sinclair) the sound collected here catalogues a series of unstructured improvisations that, with a little editing, have offered a uniquely sculpted excursion through the fringes of Brisbane's growing sonic underbelly. Each piece moves at a reflective pace, a willingness to unpack its sound worlds with patience and care, and it's this quality that perhaps makes this improvised session something more than many of the others issued under similar circumstances. The cicadas featured in the first piece offer a homely backdrop to sounds that swirl and meander through fragmented melodic pastures, occasionally surging into more coarsely textured terrain. This is offset nicely by the second track, which drones and squeals away, tainted with a drowned trumpet that splutters to stay within the auditory waves. The other two pieces again splay out into the sound roads less travelled, with strong and welcome results; the sunshine may be blown, but the light seems to be working that audio chlorophyll just the same.–LE

I must admit being quite surprised, as there is really little/nothing of my knowing to compare this with. Sounds from altered states: slow, morphing, enveloping, reaching deep to the subconscious mind. Seems like each moment “something happens”, but you only get it when you aren’t thinking, totally immersed and everything… Probably best enjoyed with big joints or just Sunday morning hangovers; strictly for the serious, patient listeners on here, craving some sonic luxury to soak in (yeah, love you too). Having said that, it would be nice to get few tips if any ‘similar’ accounts…

cookshop

Testimonial by Mrs Carrie Auburn, Houston (TX), divorced, 2 children

“When I first downloaded Sunshine Has Blown, I thought it was the latest Joanna Newsom that my little Gwennie loves so. After the first two seconds of (shock) mild surprise, I settled comfortably on my red Ikea couch, with a nice cuppa of Twinnings, being pleasantly reminded of my more favourite Pan sonic. After a while, unfortunately,I had to go set up dinner for the twins, so I left it untouched in the hi fi. However, at night, when I couldnt sleep and tossed and turned in my cold bed, I remembered your album and listened to it for hours on end. I found the thumbs piano particularly pleasurable, not only because it reminded me of my honeymoon with Al in Africa, but also because I had attended classes at my local evening school center. That was before my thumbs were burned in that terrible accident. Anyway, thank you from Houston, and may God bless you! “