VisceralMedia 001 - 004 are free online releases available at:
http://visceralmediareleases.blogspot.com/
someone else's summer
andrew weathers
vmr 007
lulla
cornstar
vmr 005
course of the symptom
michael gardiner
vmr 006
Someone Else's Summer 007
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Someone Else's Summer is about not fitting. It began as re-learning the guitar, but after those files were accidentally deleted, it became about piecing elements together. I made the pieces as I was in the long process of moving from North Carolina to California. During a period of three months I didn't have a home & was wandering - I spent a lot of time sleeping on couches and floors that summer. The album begins with the resonance of past travel and ends with a recording of my last night with a home in North Carolina. The center is an improvisation based on the finger-picking techniques I was working on (and still am). Important in these developments: John Fahey, Robbie Basho, Henry Flynt. As far as emotional content goes, the album is about isolation & not belonging. It's about observing as an outsider.
course of the symptom vmr 006
Rarely is someone with a formal and recognized institutional academic background able to both use this and reject it in relation to composition. Bernard Shaw is not the only amateur to throw doubt on the academics ability to compose freely, and Im well aware of such institutions and their priorities and hierarchies which require careful negotiation. Yet Gardiner, here using as a source discarded piano variations processed, synthesized and distorted by a wave editor into what is at most times unrecognizable sounds, noise, has achieved something quite remarkable. Though Gardiner might regard this work as more an iconoclastic blast at the past, Im more inclined to see it as a deconstruction, which is a positive trope, something long long overdue in music, to render it like others plastic arts real for the first time in centuries. And to take a big risk Im saying that this is a deconstruction which both puts into question, suspends, and animates the Hegelianism which all music was hitherto attached. Very remarkable.
Vital Weekly 776
Course of the Symptom finds its origins in a set of discarded piano variations, bracketed within a larger frame of a discarded will towards academic music altogether. Occasionally one can hear lo-fi fragments of the original surface, but all of the noise elements were generated from a synthesized then distorted version of the piano part as well. (Not that this creates any real cohesion or unity. On the contrary, if anything, the music begins to leave itselfthe synthesized versions a first step outside of a pre-given sound world, generated from the only means I had at my disposal.) The palate is minimal; a lo-fi recording of the original variations, synthesized and distorted renderings of phrases from the score, an eq and a wave editor. From time to time some textures are layered.
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Ten years after their first collaboration, lulla presents the long awaited reunion of John Latartara and Khristian Weeks. Working under the name cornstar, lulla features eight pieces compiled from computer-generated sounds layered with guitar and piano. Stylistic elements of glitch, drone, ambient, and folk interpenetrate to form a distinct style all its own. This project was the result of a long-distance collaboration, generated by exchanging sound files through the mail - Weeks created all of the original source files, which Latartara then edited, arranged and mixed into their final form. Guitars and pianos intermittently emerge into the foreground, lending a folk-like quality to the music, only to be engulfed and obliterated in an onslaught of computer processing. Lullas, shimmering surfaces envelope the music, while gently seducing the listener into its distinct sonic vision.
In essence, the tracks form restless, computer-generated whirlpools of fragmented guitar and piano sounds. The opener Elling offers a meditative four minutes of what sounds like music boxes and organs singing in joyous harmony, with the material's fluttering clicks and trills suggestive of Oval in a peaceful mood. Much of the album, in fact, is reminiscent of Oval in general style but with much of the abrasiveness removed. The jagged guitar shards of Refrained stutter as relentlessly as any Oval track ever did, while Flutter and Dream Seeds are radically besieged and broken-up by computer processing. Even if there is a derivative dimension to the album's contents, there's also no denying Lulla's occasional prettiness: its title piece is a pretty reverie of glistening and shimmering sounds, and look beyond the surface manipulations and you'll find a melancholy heart beating at the center of Stars Eyes Heart.
Textura.org
the conjure woman
video by Christen Goguen
elling
video by April Grayson
soniccuriosity review
vitalweekkly review
