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ORA - Time out of Mind

Format: CD
Label & Cat.Number: Shining Day SHINE 13
Release Year: 2017
Note: ORA was the project of ANDREW CHALK and DARREN TATE, with permanent guests COLIN POTTER and DAISUKE SUZUKI, creating a kind of 'impressionistic drone ambient' merging various field recordings with analog electronics and instruments (like flutes, percussion, harmonium) in a highly evocative way; this is a collection 15 rare (mainly studio) tracks done 1986-1994, now sequenced and arranged by ANDREW CHALK into a full-length album
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" “Time Out of Mind” represents a most important chapter in the recordings of Ora, during the years 1986-1994 and here almost all entirely unheard before. They represent unreleased studio pieces, field recordings and sketches, significantly made to portable recorder. This working method would become the basis of future and more elaborate studio pieces and in itself clarifies an important formative stage of the work of Ora, of often using outdoor performances and location sound in an entirely spontaneous way.

Time Out of Mind is not some 'lost' album of that period, but it collects and reworks, after the passage of some 20 years, what might have been and has now been mixed, sequenced and arranged by Andrew Chalk into a full- length album. It inevitably captures, with the gift of hindsight, the spirit of the past.

Line-up changes followed and working methods changed, which perhaps make “Time Out of Mind” a missing stage in the evolution of a group that should have, though never actually did, exist in that period.

Ora here was : Andrew Chalk, Darren Tate, Colin Potter and Daisuke Suzuki

Mastered at IC Studio, London

A Shining Day/ICR co-production" [label info}



"A while ago, Ora released a digital version of 'Final', a compilation of pieces that were originally released on very limited CDR releases on Gnome Records, and perhaps it should be seen as the final release by the group, consisting of Darren Tate and Andrew Chalk at the heart of it. They first recorded at Colin Potter's IC Studios and he became a member, as well as Jonathan Coleclough, Daisuke Suzuki, MNortham, and Lol Coxhill. This 'new' CD could have been called 'Beginning' as it contains the bands earliest pieces, dating from 1986 to 1994, and mostly never released before. At this point the band was Chalk, Tate, Potter (mostly engineering) and Suzuki (on two pieces).
The music here was not intended as an album, but contains bits and piece from the studio floor, field recordings and sketches, mostly on a portable recorder. And they are literally bits and pieces, as the album spans fifteen pieces, from a mere minute to six minutes, but mostly somewhere between two and three minutes. These recordings reflect the period when Ora was finding their feet, how their approach to music would be. This sees them play their instruments rather loosely improvised; this being synthesizers, flutes, percussion but, their second game, in outdoor situations, adding whatever is on site to the music. This can be a rusty fence, scraping a concrete floor of a barn, or simply let a whole bunch of sea waves do much of the work, such as in 'Olderness'. It is all quite playful I think; one hears the excitement of trying out sounds in odd locations. I mean 'Picture Box'; what are they doing and where on earth is that location? A vague rumble from outside, some sorts percussive rumble and stumble in this small space (which
presumably is in fact a picture box). And sometimes they are in the studio as in 'From First To Last', experimenting a few sounds on a synthesizer or on a harmonium, the latter in 'Windmill' (and yes, if I apply the same logic here, then this would have been recorded in a windmill). This has some of the more drone excursions you'd probably expect them to do, but this early proof is that they had so much more on their plate. This is an excellent archaeological find." [FdW/Vital Weekly]