Y allí afuera no hay nadie, todo lo diría si lo preguntáramos en voz alta; y si se nos escuchase preguntarlo; o si se consintiera en recoger esta absurda pregunta. Nadie, salvo el reflejo difuso de todos los rostros en los vidrios intactos empavonados de nadie. / Fragmento de: La pieza Oscura , Por: Enrique Lihn
Deerhunter began in 2001 with the ambition of fusing the lulling hypnotic states induced by ambient and minimalist music with the klang and propulsion of garage rock. The band has weathered chaotic line-up changes, the death of a member, and much discouragement. Their live performances almost always leave audiences polarized. They are a five-piece based in Atlanta.
Atlanta-based Deerhunter are set to release Microcastle, the follow-up to 2007's Cryptograms on October 31, 2008. Microcastle will be released simultaneously on CD and LP via Kranky in North America and 4AD in Europe.
Microcastle was recorded over the course of a week at Rare Book Studios in Brooklyn, New York with Nicolas Verhes. The album was recorded as a four-piece consisting of Bradford Cox, Lockett Pundt, Joshua Fauver, and Moses Archuleta.
"Saved by Old Times" features a vocal collage by Cole Alexander of the Black Lips. The album also features two songs with lead vocals by guitarist Lockett Pundt: "Agoraphobia," and "Neither of Us, Uncertainly."
Growing evolved out of two bands, Joe Denardo from Black Man White Man Dead Man and Kevin Doria from 1000 A.D., in Olympia, WA. in the fall of 2001. Joe Denardo moved from Chicago to Olympia and helped operate the Thin The Herd label with Zack Carlson, which released early material from Vaz and Total Shutdown. Eryn Ross joined to make Growing a trio. Moving from hardcore towards something slower and more expansive the band played around it's hometown and up and down the West Coast of the United States. The first Growing release was a 7 inch single on the Nail In the Coffin label.
Growing played in a variety of settings and contexts, from art gallery to hardcore all-ages shows. The group has arranged quadraphonic sound installations and lugged stacks onto a stage. Growing have made soundtracks for videos (most recently a project for continuous two channel video and multichannel sound installation with Lisa Darms) and often play accompanied by Denardo's photographs. Growing self-released a number of cassettes of music.
After a tip from Paul Dickow of Strategy, who played a show with Growing and was struck by their quadraphonic sound environment, kranky began the process of releasing the debut Growing album in spring 2003. The Sky's Run Into The Sea came out in August 2003. As Denardo described the recording process, "We recorded the record with a friend, so the atmosphere was very laid back and cheap, this was long before kranky decided to put it out. It took place over three months over three months, but mostly because of equipment failure. Since it was winter it rained a lot."
Otis Hart described the nature of the band's music in Dusted: "Reach for an initial word, a label - say Doom Metal - then watch, as the demonic guitars slowly morph into demonstrative bliss. Drone may come a bit closer to the truth, but only slightly, as silence plays an equally significant role in the proceedings. Alas, Growing's anomalous sounds dwell in perpetual nigh-fidelity, permeating the gaps between equalizer settings with evasive intent, frustrating any attempr at optimization, and therefore, classification."
After the release of their debut longplayer Growing toured the West and East Coasts. The band is moving their base of operations to New York City. Animal Disguise Records is re-releasing tour tapes and a double cassette, two channel album called Above/Below Sea Level. Heroine Records in Italy is releasing a split CD/LP with Growing and M. Evan Burden (of Get Hustle). In March 2003 Growing will play shows in California with Chicago instro-metal overlords Pelican in preparation for a split release on the Hydra Head label. And in spring 2004 Growing journey to Portland, OR to mix their next album at Magnetic Park with Rex Ritter of Jessamine/Fontanelle at the board.
So began in 2002 with the pair of Eri and Markus Popp (Oval, Microstoria) working together as a true symmetrical duo with both members equally contributing to the songwriting and electronic processing. An absolute departure from Oval, So's debut CD is a melodic, at times soothing technological demonstration. The album began as a reworking of a song cycle from Eri's archives. These archives are comprised of a vast collection of diverse materials she recorded in her parents' house in Mito-City, Japan. The sounds represent a significant departure from the dense, abrasion of Oval's ground-breaking Commers series, and instead moves towards more airy and organic tones. The inclusion of vocals and live instrumentation allow for So's music to expand far beyond the constraints of the purely digital.
So derives its momentum from an almost constant confrontation with Markus and Eri's conceptualizations and implementations of music. The actual collaborative process is more a resemblance of an 18th century naval battle than a convenient exercise in file sharing. It is fundamentally different to Oval recordings which are linear and strategic on the planning board, while So lost the compass from the beginning and is more a free project.
Album artwork was created by Katsumi Yokota, the prolific Japanese illustrator who made contributions to the most experimental stages of the United Game Artist's video game classic, Rez (released for Dreamcast and PS2 in 2002). There are no song titles as it is too much of a compromise to put English song titles to Japanese lyrics. So will be touring with Oval in the fall of 2003. For these shows, Markus and Eri have built a completely customized, So Fi-PA-system. It will consist of two Triode amplifiers based on ancient schematics, rated at 6-8 Watts each. As well a set of homemade broadband speakers consisting of 1950s broadband speakers (from movie theaters), using an empty bottle as a quasi-backloaded Tractrix (Spherical) horn and mounted in plain cardboard boxes. This custom traveling PA will allow them to perform concerts in cafes and galleries as well as clubs. Perhaps a reaction to the reaction that has become the standard.
It's impossible: no one could create a script this contrived. Yet, apparently, it happened. William Basinski's four-disk epic, The Disintegration Loops, was created out of tape loops Basinski made back in the early 1980s. These loops held some personal significance to Basinski, a significance he only touches on in the liner notes and we can only guess at. Originally, he just wanted to transfer the loops from analog reel-to-reel tape to digital hard disk. However, once he started the transfer, he discovered something: the tapes were old and they were disintegrating as they played and as he recorded. As he notes in the liner notes, "The music was dying." But he kept recording, documenting the death of these loops. These recordings were made in August and September of 2001. Now, this is where the story gets impossible. William Basinski lives in Brooklyn, less than a nautical mile from the World Trade Centers. On September 11, 2001, as he was completing The Disintegration Loops, he watched these towers disintegrate. He and his friends went on the roof of his building and played the Loops over and over, all day long, watching the slow death of one New York and the slow rise of another, all the while listening to the death of one music and the creation of another. As I said, it's impossible. The music, however, is beautiful, subtle, sad, frightening, confusing, and ultimately uplifting. What's he created here is a living document: a field recording of orchestrated decay. It sounds like nothing else I've heard, yet, at its core, it's the simplest and most familiar music I can imagine. The four disks comprise six unique works. There is some overlap on the different disks; in fact, the first work (which Basinski calls "D|P 1") begins on disk one and ends on disk four. Some of the works are very long ("D|P 1" is over 90 minutes), while some are relatively short ("D|P 4" is only 20 minutes). However, each of the six works employs a different, repeating loop that slowly deteriorates into oblivion. The loops are very simple: a lush string or synth melody backed by atmospheric arpeggio countermelodies. The melodies are, as Basinski notes, pastoral: lush, simple works intended as idealized representations of nature and beauty. In theory, then, this is ambient music: music designed to set a mood, evoke a feeling (like a cinematic score), but one that is not designed for deep listening. That, I'm sure, was Basinski's initial design when he first created these loops in 1982. But time has slowly killed these loops and the pastoral (and ambient) ideals they once represented. What we hear on The Disintegration Loops are not poetic images of nature or beauty but nature and beauty as they truly exist in this world: always fleeting, slowly dying. What makes these works so memorable is not the fact that the loops are slowly disintegrating but the fact that we get to hear their deaths. In a very real way, we experience the muddled, ugly, brutal realities of life. What's more, these muddled, ugly, brutal realities of life are, in their own way, incredibly beautiful, perhaps more beautiful than the original, pristine loops ever could have been. As with any natural occurrence, these individual loops all die very individual deaths. "D|P 3," for example, begins as a bright, bold, orchestral melody that, over the course of 42 minutes, is slowly reduced to a sputtering, churning blob of its former self. The melody disintegrates slowly, until, by the end, only portions are audible; the rest is silence and noise. By contrast, the longest piece, "D|P 1," because it is split into three distinct parts ("1.1" on disk one; "1.2" and "1.3" on disk four), actually dies three separate deaths. Each one begins as soft, warm halos of sound, which then slowly mutates into muddled fragments. And then there's "D|P 4," the smallest work. It begins as a full-fledged melody but slowly devolves into chaos: silences slowly spreading across huge gaps in the loop, while the muddled melody struggles on, barely perceptible, until it, too, is silenced into oblivion. This is not ambient music; this is not one melody played over and over to fill the background space of a Japanese restaurant. This is natural music: music created from the elemental forces of life and as a testament to those forces. This is the sound of entropy, the sound of life as it decays and dies before our ears. And like all living things, these sounds struggle and claw for life with their last, dying breaths. Their deaths are a memorial to Basinski's past. That he dedicates these works to the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks is fitting. I can think of no better tribute, no better response to a tragedy of that magnitude than a work as beautiful and as fragile as this one.
+++++++++++++++ A demonstration of VHS generation loss
Video signals decay rapidly when copied repeatedly on domestic VHS video recorders. This video demonstrates the results, showing the degredation of the signal up to 11 generations. William Basinski did this with audio signals in an ambient epic called "The Disintegration Loops", however; the music in this video is written by me (using similar analogue mag-tape techniques to Basinski).
Casi estoy de regreso, les dejo este disquito que esta de onda... son remixes raros de varios grandes artistas... viene uno de Björk (all is full of love).
Otro disco, otro vuelo con música de los mismos, Windy & Carl. El ocaso a traído varias palabras sin fonética, escondidas en lo más profundo de un alma perdida, bohemia, solo naturalidad, espontáneas conjunciones de amantes en las flores, insertas en el ambiente, entre el concreto, las casas, los autos circulando, las calles, el aire sucio, son flores amándose sin moverse. Tal magnitud esta fuera del impresionismo amenazador que formulan estilos de vida moderna, pero se entiende del feedback el compromiso latiendo hacia un mismo destino, por diferentes locaciones, colores en el día o la caída del cuerpo sobre el agua dulce, disolviéndose para oscurecer el lago con veneno, con un ser humano destinándose, y todo ese poder curativo vuelve, aquí!, gracias Majorbonobo!.
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Another disc, another flight with music of the same ones, Windy and Carl. The west to worn several words without phonetics, hidden in the deepest of a lost, Bohemian soul, the alone naturalness, lovers' spontaneous conjunctions in the flowers, you insert in the environment, between the concrete one, the houses, the cars circulating, the streets, the dirty air, they are flowers being loved without moving. Such a this magnitude out of the menacing impresionism that there formulate ways of modern life, but he understands himself of the feedback the commitment latiendo towards the same destiny, for different leases, colors in the day or the fall of the body on the sweet water, dissolving to get dark the lake with poison, with a human being being destined, and all this curative power returns, here!, thank you Majorbonobo!.