James Ferraro – ‘Rerex’ 3LP
James Ferraro is an experimental musician, composer and virtual atmospherist born in Bronx, NY. Ferraro has released material under a wide array of aliases, and was a member of the Californian two-piece avant-garde project The Skaters. His album Far Side Virtual was chosen as Album of the Year by the UK’s Wire Magazine in 2011. Ferraro has been producing small runs of releases on cassette, CD-R, and VHS with a wide variety of styles all representing different dreams of a demonic mind tower spanning from freak flesh bodybuilder atmospheres to ambient modern world/psych. First on New Age Tapes and later on MuscleWork Inc., self run cassette / CD-R labels primarily used for releasing small runs of his solo work. In the summer of 2009 Ferraro composed and recorded the Summer Headrush Series in Antwerp, Belgium for Musclework Inc. The series is loosely based on visualisations that came to mind while receiving self-induced hypocapnia (aka choking oneself) or as it’s commonly called ‘free fall’. The albums being representatives of the free fall head space. Other albums from the Headrush Series are: Body Fusion 1 and 2, iAsia, Wild World, Son of Dracula and Hacker Track. The Rerex album is vintage hypnagogic Ferraro and with it’s length (almost 3 hours) it may be considered as one of his Magnum Opuses. Using cheap casio keyboards, loops, effects and difficult to trace samples Ferraro creates a slightly haunting but oh so beautiful musical world. Please use headphones for a dynamic HD headphone experience.
Ian William Craig – ‘Meaning Turns To Whispers’ LP
“I realized at the end of the album that I didn’t want to express, I just wanted to explore.” Ian Wiliam Craig is a trained opera singer and painter out of Vancouver, Canada. Over the last few years he has proved to be one of the most original artists active in the ambient / experimental genre. His debut “A Turn Of Breath” (2014) and the follow-up album “Cradle For The Wanting” (2015) received high acclaim across the globe. Meaning Turns to Whispers is a combination of piano improvisations and FM feedback loops, recorded over various winters in the period 2009-2011 and edited down / manipulated / degraded to reveal some of their hidden spaces. The discreet piano layers mixed with waves of white noise keep on intriguing and make us longing for more. Craig has been making music since 2009, when he sat at a piano and started recording improvisations. The result was Meaning Turns to Whispers, a record rooted in a gorgeous neo-classical tradition, but totally fucked up by tape manipulations that made it anything but pretty. For Craig, the use of reel-to-reels is a way of decaying sentimentality: any time his music has come too close to meeting his expectations, he’s uprooted it, creating impervious walls or bursts of modest but stupefying noise, anything that might help rewrite the truth. In choice moments on Meaning, you could hear Craig trying to imagine the lived lives of his inanimate instruments: beyond the notes he played on his piano, there was the sound it made, if only for a few seconds; when you heard him beaming down on the piano, its wooden infrastructure was revealed, and it sounded like it had its own set of motivations. “I was living with my sister in Edmonton, and during the ridiculously cold winter, I gutted her piano and mic’d it up in a whole bunch of weird ways. I recorded probably 20 hours of material, and after listening to it I was amazed at how much it sounded like sentimental crap. At that point I was really trying to express something, and afterwards I thought the only way through would be to destroy the recordings, and that’s what Meaning Turns To Whispers is. It’s completely mangled to remove that struggle for expression. I realized at the end of that album that I didn’t want to express, I just wanted to explore.”