STEVEN R SMITH + DIRK SERRIES – ‘Hymnal’ C40
Multi-instrumentalist Steven R. Smith and veteran experimentalist Dirk Serries teamed up for a collaborative album that is as familiar as it is different from their individual sonic endeavors. Made with electric guitars, fender rhodes, organs and all various types of bowed instruments, this album is about organic evolution. Each ‘mantra’ constructed from the directness of each instrument, meticulously layered against each other, creating the drone. Four long-form pieces; four harmonic themes that excel in their own beautiful organic progress over time.
ADAM BASANTA – ‘A Room Listening To Itself’ C50
Adam Basanta is a Montreal-based sound artist and experimental music composer. His sound installations investigate intersections between sound reproduction, consumer technologies and the activity of listening.
In A Room Listening to Itself, the artist produced sound exclusively through amplification techniques which make audible the physical relationships between microphones and reclaimed speaker cones within a gallery’s surrounding acoustic environment.
In this work, eight iconic SM58 microphones and eight reclaimed speaker cones are dispersed throughout the gallery space, arranged in a manner which produces complex computer-controlled feedback and recursive amplification networks. Using these acoustic phenomena, the gallery space is turned into a giant resonator that amplifies acoustic space as a product of spatial relationships. Custom-built software algorithms constantly re-calibrate the room to ever-changing acoustic situations, aiming for a sonic equilibrium that remains out of reach.
The result is an ever-changing spatial composition encompassing ambient passages, resonant chords, and rhythmic activities – created solely using feedback – through which gallery visitors can navigate.
CATERINA BARBIERI – ‘Vertical’ C50
** 2016 Repress ** Vertical is Caterina Barbieri’s debut album and it was composed for vocals and Buchla 200 modular synthesizer. Vertical takes a meditative approach to primary waveforms and the polyrhythm of harmonics, stretching the boundaries between drone, minimalism and techno in multichannel systems. This minimalistic focus arises from the polyrhythmic and stratigraphic potential of voltage-controlled sequencer
LARSEN – ‘Play’ LP
10 year anniversary pressing. We’ve got very limited stock on white and black vinyl. As an excercise preceding the writing of Play, Larsen spent a lot of time as a group improvising around some of their favorite melodies from Autechre albums. This experimental excercise slowly evolved into song writing and suddenly songs were coming out of the air with Autecherian melodies filtered through climactic Larsen arrangements. Play is a collection of Larsen “suites” where hints of Autechre drift as inspiring ghosts rather than constituent matter. According to Larsen, they attempted to create curvilinear, not angular, interpretations of these melodies in an electric way, not an electronic way, with the eclectic instrumentation regular in Larsen’s arrangement. As they planned, they failed perfectly at covering Autechre creating a hauntingly erruptive and droned out Larsen masterpiece in the process.