Ardeer Peninsula is a tape of guitar music. 15 tracks. 15 artists.
The peninsula is quiet. Dunes stretch with the wind. Salt marshes smell of wet earth and old water. Birds move across the sky. Bees hover. Sometimes the place is empty. Sometimes all you hear is the hum of insects and the scrape of sand underfoot.
Walking along paths that are overgrown. Like standing still and noticing small things: a blade of grass, a rustle of leaves, a crow far away. Some tracks are sharp, some soft, some linger. Each one finds a piece of the place. Each one notices something slightly different.
Ardeer used to be something else. Factories and explosives. Now it is alive in quiet ways. The ground hums with plants, insects, wind. You can feel it if you pay attention. The tape tries to catch that feeling. Not exactly, not literally, but enough to know it is there.
It is music to walk with. To sit with. To think of a place that exists and changes, that is remembered and present.
I would like to thank everyone who helped me put this together but in particular Kata Szász-Komlós, Lee Strain and Gary Taylor.
Eco-friendly printing by Peaceful Dove Press.
Collected and curated by Steven Kerr.
"Shorter days, longer nights, it’s easy to find oneself 20 clicks deep in a discogs wormhole searching for the thing you’ve been wanting forever. How easy is it to forget the here and now? The music that’s happening as we speak, that’s at your fingertips. The Ardeer Peninsula quietly collects up fifteen pieces of new music from 15 different artists, all internationally dislocated but interconnected through pursuit of genuine, modest self-expression. This is gentle music for winding down the clock, a sonic accompaniment for noticing the change in seasons and the fresh chill in the air. Many of these names are known to us - A Happy Return, Gothenburg’s Amateur Hour, Jim Strong, People Skills, Memotone and more, but new names such as Thoughtless Gift, Japanese artists Sonotanotanpenz and Craggyland make excellent company and reveal there’s constantly more to this scene that keeps giving. It’s always helpful to have a snapshot in time of a collection of artists loosely bound together, much like the Insane Music compilations or Cordelia’s Obscure Independent Classics series, Ardeer Peninsula is a timestamp of a future date that people wished they lived through"