18 November 2012

Albums and Singles

Steve Hauschildt steps out on Sequitur to make a case for himself as a talented producer of meticulously sequenced pop music. Like Emeralds' latest effort Just To Feel Anything, this record is a logical next step for Steve; rooted in new wave, techno, and a blend of genre exercise and timeless cohesion, and while it's common for ambient or electronic groups to evolve towards making pop-oriented albums, it's still a pleasant course that unfolds when handled with skill and subtlety.

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18 November 2012

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Steve Hauschildt steps out on Sequitur to make a case for himself as a talented producer of meticulously sequenced pop music. Like Emeralds' latest effort Just To Feel Anything, this record is a logical next step for Steve; rooted in new wave, techno, and a blend of genre exercise and timeless cohesion, and while it's common for ambient or electronic groups to evolve towards making pop-oriented albums, it's still a pleasant course that unfolds when handled with skill and subtlety.

Kranky

Sequitur's overly literal title is intended as a reference to 2011's Tragedy And Geometry, suggesting a natural conclusion to the ethereal, androgynous synth forms which characterized that record. The major contrast present in Sequitur that suggests a linear direction from that work is Hauschildt's vastly greater assortment of instruments and ideas on display. T&E was slightly pop-oriented minimalism, drawing all its melodies from the work of a single synthesizer and themes of hypersaturation and technology. Sequitur skips a step or two, jumping beyond the anticipatory revelations of "artist discovers verse-chorus songcraft," and heading straight for ambitious new ground, grafting his futurist stylings onto pop templates. It's the kind of forethought that suggests he's been working on these songs for far longer than I imagined.

For the most part, the pieces fit together. Standout tracks like "Interconnected" and "Constant Reminders" hit a nostalgic soft spot that perfectly blends Steve's unique sonic fingerprint with arpeggiated melodies, distorted guitars, drum machines, a vocoder (on the latter song) and an abundance of synthesized strings following familiar chord progressions like the theme song to a sci-fi cult classic. The breathtaking "Kept," meanwhile, ditches the percussion for cascades of ecstatic kosmische drone in a late-album highlight.

Hauschildt's cascading melodies assault the senses to the point of overwhelming, even as they would suggest otherwise. The polyrhythmic delays in the title track, for example, hit an apex at the two minute mark where there isn't a single spot unoccupied by sound. Every note and subdivision is filled with a pleasant blip or its fading echoes; the song reaches the last stage of agglutination where there's nothing left to add, after which the song dies out. The music's never harsh, but it is so unyielding that it borders on sensory overload. Steve presses on with this kind of additive style so often that when brief moments of silence do occur, they are all that much more welcome. It so happens that Sequitur's poppier songs—and the ones I enjoyed the most—are the songs that acknowledge how important those empty spaces are.

If I had to find one glaring problem with this album, it would be that Steve's weaker moments are on display in equal measure with his stronger ones. Tracks that don't stand out tend to retread the same ground, making for a pretty even split. This could be attributed to Hauschildt's obsession with sounding "pure"—which I would argue risks sacrificing a song's personality—but the better parts of the album share those same perfectionist qualities. They're just better, in a way I can't pinpoint. But that's the thing about pop; it thrives on those precious details. Hauschildt still hasn't quite found a niche for himself as a solo artist, but this is a promising leap forward. And at this rate it will take maybe one or two albums for Steve to perfect his formula.

samples:

• Interconnected
• Kept

 

17 November 2012

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Albums and Singles

Matt Weston’s last release, the Organum-esque scrape and drone fest "Kidnapping Denials/Put on a Good Face" did an exemplary job at capturing him in his natural habitat as a percussionist, albeit a rather unconventional one. While that was based upon live recordings, his newest 7" is a bit more multi-instrumentalist and studio-centric in its approach. Made up of two rather brief pieces, it is a tantalizingly short yet fully engaging single.

7272 Music

On the A side, "Searchlight Swings" is underscored by gargantuan, timpani like rhythms and the tell tale buzz of a guitar amplifier.From here he adds oddly tense bits of interference and alarm-like tones that cut through abrasively.By the end he has worked in sped-up voices and what could be a car alarm, resulting in an unsettlingly erratic, challenging and complex bit of music, all in the span of around three minutes.

For the flip side, "Is That Helicopter Over Our House?" is a somewhat less confrontational piece.Instead Weston works more with rudimentary beat boxes and eccentric synth tones in an idiosyncratic, and somewhat fun sounding work.On the whole it is more traditionally structured, and once the horn-like bits are brought in, feels like a lost pre-Mix Up Cabaret Voltaire outtake in the best possible way.

Weston works within the format of the 7" single very well here, pairing a more difficult, disquieting piece with a lighter, quirkily catchy one.Perhaps the greatest limitation is that there are really only a few minutes here, which only led to me wanting more to be added.Looking at his discography, it seems like solo albums are not really his thing, which is admittedly somewhat frustrating when I just wanted to hear more of this once the record was finished.As it stands though, it is a brilliant combination of two distinctly different pieces of music, but both bearing the mark of a truly unique composer and performer.

17 November 2012

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Albums and Singles

Pornoise 1 KG is somewhat of a landmark release in Masami Akita’s sprawling, ever expanding and complex discography. Recorded in 1984 and issued multiple times as a five-cassette set not long after, it represents one of the first long form collections of Merzbow to have been released. Reissued here on six CDs (including the separately released Pornoise Extra as disc six), it makes for an excellent snapshot of what Akita first started out doing, and hints at what would come later in his long career.

Menstrual Recordings

I have mentioned in multiple Merzbow reviews that, while Venerology was my introduction to his work and the world of noise, I have always favored his earlier releases in contrast to the purely harsh approach he started focusing on in the 1990s.Considering when this set was recorded, it was something I was eager to hear, and it has all of the greatness and shortcomings I could have expected for such a expansive collection.In his earliest works, Akita was heavily into manipulating tape loops, and that is something that can be heard throughout on this collection.Right on the first disc, "Loop Fuck/Obituary Part 1" is an exemplary work in this style.Overdriven loops of rhythm are layered on top of one another to create some sense of structure and composition, even if everything else in the mix is purely distorted and chaotically explosive.It is not hard to hear the seeds planted of what Kohei Gomi of Pain Jerk would start doing a few years later, either.

Loops are heavily featured in "Toy 69" a few discs later, with an odd mechanical crunch to them that makes for a more standout, less abrasive feel with a peppering of voice loops thrown in."Night Noise White" also has Akita building on overt loops of radio communications and droning electronics.At first it is rather repetitive, but as he transitions the sound to a more harsh noise oriented one rather than exclusively tape loops, the piece becomes noticeably more dynamic and varied.At times, however, this repetition is less engaging."UFO vs. British Army" ends with a nice bit of vintage Merzbow crunch and distortion, but the loop-centric repetition across the half-hour duration makes the journey to that conclusion a bit dull.

The other part of Akita's sound that was being utilized at this time was metal and junk percussion, and that also is nicely presented throughout these six discs."Penis Art is Microphone" is nice and chaotic from a rhythmic perspective, and evolves into a more electronic-based piece quite well while retaining the appropriate amount of metallic clang and bashing.In some cases he blends these two styles together extremely well.The squalling, loop-y noise that opens "Loop Fuck/Obituary Part 3" eventually relents to a clattering mass of percussion that sounds like a recorder left in a washing machine that was pushed down an exceptionally long staircase.

In his heavy use of loops, Akita also ends up blending in some more conventional sounding passages that verge on being considered musical."International Velvet," for instance, has some almost normal sounding bits of synthesizer placed throughout the otherwise distorted mix, and later on even a bit of what could be a Theremin popping up.Some actual drumming appears on "Komala-Lomata 1-3," with Akita never being able to fully escape his time as a Deep Purple tribute band drummer, but the piece eventually devolves into a mass of cheap drum machine and vintage industrial electronics."Paripunna-Purisa-Byan-Janatad," which concludes the sixth and final disc, is an especially odd entry.Propelled by a drum machine rhythm that can almost be described as funky, he casts out blasts of noise here and there, but by the end it becomes heavily built around a pure electronic pulse that results in something that sounds like the most radical deconstruction of synth pop that can be imagined, and that is a great thing.

Six hours of Merzbow is a lot for anything but a hardcore fan, but there is simply so many different styles and variations of Masami Akita's work to be heard on Pornoise 1 KG that it is rather easy to recommend.Sure, there are some warts, largely in the form of overly repetitive moments across these largely half-hour long pieces, but everything else:the junk rhythms, the crunchy distortion, and the strange flirtations with music, are all quite enjoyable.Considering the nature of these recordings, the transfer to digital also went very well, with a mastering job that keeps the grime that is supposed to be there, but not much in the way of unwanted analog artifacts.It can be weird and at times unpleasant, but what else should a Merzbow release be?

samples:

• Loop Fuck/Obituary Part 3
• International Velvet
• Paripunna-Purisa-Byan-Janatad

 

16 November 2012

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Albums and Singles

I have long been a great admirer of Tom Ellard's prickly, erratic, and singular genius, but I completely slept on this deluxe reissue from Medical Records for much of the year, as I did not recall 1985's Stretcher EP as being particularly crucial or something that I would ever need to own on vinyl.  In that regard, I was mostly correct, but I was unaware that Stretcher had surfaced in so many different variations or that consolidating them all would yield an excellent double album.  Therein lays the genius of this reissue, as such an absolute avalanche of classic material from this era packs a lot of cumulative power.  In fact, this is probably the best single documentation of Severed Heads' golden age available: the brief window in the mid-'80s where Ellard’s deranged and perverse experimentalism started to take shape into eccentric and hook-filled pop structures.

Medical

The bizarre story of Stretcher makes my head spin, as it stands as an especially convoluted release in the canon of an artist whose discography is a messy labyrinth of long-dead record companies, self-curated CDR reissues, and differing international versions of seemingly everything.  Stretcher was originally intended as kind of an accessible sampler designed to optimistically break the band in the US, but then the idea and format transformed as the release was pitched for other markets, resulting in a Canadian EP, a differing UK EP, and (of course) a different LP for the band's home country of Australia.  Naturally, combining four commercially minded releases by a mostly rather difficult and unmarketable band makes for quite a bizarre and interesting grab bag.

A lot of the pieces included in Stretcher's various incarnations were new songs written specifically for the release, but anyone familiar with Severed Heads at all will likely recognize the inevitable "Dead Eyes Opened" and "Petrol," both of which appear in remixed form.  There is also a demo version of The Big Bigot's "Harold and Cindy Hospital."  Also, if I am not crazy, I think there are some sneakily re-titled songs that appeared in other forms elsewhere, as "New Explosions" is an altered version of City Slab Horror's "Now, An Explosive New Movie."  The vinyl version apparently includes helpful background information on each of these pieces, which belatedly seems like a reference I could benefit from.  Alas.  Despite all the real and possibly imagined recycling here, 1985 was unquestionably a compelling and creatively fertile time for the band, as remaining second member Stephen Jones turned Severed Heads' shows into a video-centric multimedia events while Ellard started dabbling in MIDI synthesizers for the first time, setting the stage for the more pristine and conventionally musical synth-pop that was to come later.

For Stretcher, however, Ellard's blossoming pop craftsmanship was still gloriously at odds with his zeal for amusingly obsessive use of samples and grainy tape experiments.  Even the somewhat unabashed stabs at pop are still extremely damn weird, as the upbeat and hooky would-be single "Halo" degenerates into a wonderful cacophony of piled up samples (including one of a man falling down the stairs and possibly an angry cartoon duck).  Also, Ellard’s brilliantly annoying sense of humor is still capable of making me smirk 30 years later, particularly as exhibited in the groove built from a woman’s surprised yelp in "Oscar’s Grind" or the obsessive and chopped repetition of the title phrase in "Don't Say It."  The latter is also a fine example of Ellard's singular ability to turn something initially obnoxious into something weirdly beautiful, as the sample gradually becomes surrounded by a vibrant and harmonically rich swirl of swooping and see-sawing tones.

While nearly all of the pieces included are shot through with some kind of deranged inspiration, it is the inclusion of "Blast Platter" and "Spurned" that makes this an absolutely crucial release for anyone interested in Ellard's work, as both easily stand among the greatest pieces that he has ever composed.  "Blast Platter' is a shuffling, brooding, and concise "pop" song built upon what sounds like a gibbering and warped opera sample.  While I love the sample, the rest of the song is even more perfect, as it unexpectedly erupts into a gorgeous synth motif and boasts a surprisingly understated and haunting chorus.  If I played it for a friend and they did not sufficiently appreciate it, I would demand to know when their soul died.  "Spurned," on the other hand, goes in the complete opposite direction, weaving a ghostly web of collaged female classical vocal loops into a ten-minute epic that resembles an industrial-damaged Lisa Gerrard piece heard through a heavy fog of drugs.

Naturally, there are some elements to this material that can reasonably be considered primitive or dated (particularly the beats), but I personally find them largely endearing.  I suppose it could also be argued that Stretcher could do without re-heated and over-familiar material like the 12" remixes of the bands' "hits," yet those pieces probably provide a welcome foothold for newer listeners to embrace until the weirder, less accessible bits start to burrow into their subconscious.  Ultimately, it is those weird bits that make Severed Heads special: Stretcher does not always capture Ellard at the top of his songwriting game, but it does capture an aesthetic zenith of sorts, as this is the ephemeral sweet spot where deranged experimentation, burgeoning pop instincts, and general ballsiness were in perfect harmony.  Stretcher's true charm lies in how compellingly and consistently Ellard manages wrest sublime beauty from obstinate contrarianism, a gleefully impish sense of humor, and unfettered imagination.  The results are sometimes messy, clunky, or amusingly annoying, but they never sound like anyone else and the occasional moments where everything falls gloriously into place make it all worthwhile.  Medical Records has truly achieved a feat of curatorial wizardry here, assembling far-flung odds n' ends into an album that rivals or surpasses most of Severed Heads' acknowledged classic albums like City Slab Horror or Since the Accident.  While it is admittedly possible that the novelty of this material is still clouding my generally unerring judgment, I happily pair this album with Cuisine as one of the two most essential releases in the Severed Heads discography.

Samples:

• Blast Platter
• New Explosions
• Spurned

 

11 November 2012

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Albums and Singles

Holly Herndon's Movement is the debut offering of material by the young musician, modernist, and machinist.

Restless for reckless cultural immersion, Herndon left her Johnson City, Tennessee home as a teenager for Berlin, Germany. For several years, Herndon lived and learned techno music as party dweller and performer, eventually returning wide-minded to the States to pursue a Masters in Electronic Music at Mills College. Under the guidance of network pioneer John Bischoff, Roscoe Mitchell, and Maggi Payne, Herndon pursued her experiments with processed voice and explored embodiment in electronic music, earning the Elizabeth Mills Crothers award for best composer in 2011.

Started at the end of Herndon's studies, Movement is a test chamber that hybridizes her modern composition training and undying devotion to club music. To this extent, the influences of Maryanne Amacher and Galina Ustvolskaya are as prevalent in Herndon's music as Pan Sonic and Berlin and Birmingham 90s techno. Still, in line with pop deconstructionists Laurie Anderson and Art of Noise, Movement is purposefully positioned to reach new ears beyond a niche.

Honoring a strong tradition of computer composition from Stockhausen to Florian Hecker, Herndon is unapologetic about using a machine as her primary instrument. She builds most of her own instruments and vocal effects in the visual programming language Max/MSP, and sees it as a principled part of her practice to push the most modern processors to their limits.

"The laptop is the most intimate instrument we have at our disposal, engaging and absorbing our confessions and inspirations" says Herndon. "Its influence has both devastated and invigorated music as we know it. We've only just begun unlocking the possibilities at our fingertips. Those possibilities are what I work towards and against."

Incorporating themes of presence and physicality / flux and futurity within said musical expressions and tool set, Movement translates the Avant-Garde into what Herndon fundamentally considers "life practice." Movement opens with the malfunctioning hum and cyborg stutter of "Terminal." "Breathe," a minimalist articulation of data complexity within the human voice, informs the processing of Herndon's own vocal melodies in the syncopated house track "Fade."

The collection’s centerpiece "Movement" is about human-computer symbiosis and musically re-imagines what is perceived as "natural" atop a vigilant acid grind. "Dilato" drifts the live baritone vocal stream of Bruce Rameker through a slight digital process to curious mortal frays.

Herndon's ability to sharp turn from synthetic psychosis to hard-coded human sensuality allows Movement approachability for any listener knowingly or unknowingly seeking technological enlightenment. For those listeners escaping grid integration for holistic antiquity, keep a copy of Movement handy. You'll need the manual for reconfiguration later.

More information here.

11 November 2012

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Albums and Singles

Exactly one year on from his last album, Steve Hauschildt returns with his most commanding work to date. Dense and lush arrangements conjure introspective atmospheres that reveal not only his contribution to the band Emeralds, but his ever-evolving strengths as a solo artist. Recorded in Vancouver and Cleveland, nearly 20 different instruments were culled from the 1960s to the present. This lends the album a much wider palette than its predecessor, Tragedy & Geometry. It is still, however, a logical follow-up to that work as the title Sequitur subtly implies. Because of its rich instrumentation, there are classic yet cutting-edge soundscapes fashioned out of the idiosyncrasies innate to the copious synthesizers, drum machines, and vocal processing used on the album. A substantial work, Hauschildt hones in on the place of voice and androgyny in music.

From Steve Hauschildt: "I was very interested in the artificiality of vocal or choir-like sounds that emulate a person or group singing, and how this has evolved with the advancement of musical technology over the decades. I also sang myself and used a vocoder. This was not to sound robotic or to auto-tune notes, but instead used to remove the connotations of gender inherent in the vocal formants that define how we naturally assign gender qualities to sounds, particularly the human voice. It was interesting to discover that certain replicable sounds become 'androgynous' when they carry both masculine and feminine characteristics. I was inspired to carry this idea into music mainly because of the work of Camille Paglia, Rosalind Picard and Donna Haraway. In a sense, the album treads the imaginary boundary between Nature and Artifice. Of course it is within a postmodern trajectory, but not necessarily a statement on cyborg theory or feminism. Rather, Sequitur is a musical domain where these ideas freely collide and coalesce to form emotive states for the listener."

More information here.

11 November 2012

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Albums and Singles

Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe has been through many shifts in his musical career, from playing with influential Chicago rockers 90 Day Men and forging haunting vocal drones as Lichens all the way to becoming a member of transcendent rockers Om and collaborating with Lucky Dragons and Doug Aitken, and Timon Irnok Manta marks the beginning of a brand new stage in his process. Recorded under his full name and based on fabled British science fiction series "The Tomorrow People," the record establishes Lowe’s format perfectly, with a single mantra-like piece followed by a 'version' in classic dub fashion."‘M'Bondo" follows closely in the footsteps of Lowe's recent slew of highly limited private-press releases, taking tumbling electrified rhythms and setting them up against slowly modulating analogue patterns, gradually building into something even more revenant. A far cry from the maximalist synthesizer music that has come to represent the norm, this is bass-heavy and precariously stripped bare, leaving only skeletons of influence and form.

On "M'Bondo (version)" we are given a closer look into Lowe's wide range of influences as he touches on Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works II, early Popul Vuh and Rhythm and Sound in one fell swoop. The basic building blocks of the original track are still present, but graced with Lowe's unmistakable voice and punctuated by warbling tape hiss and chilling echoes. This is a brave step from one of the most compelling voices in experimental music, and the beginning of what promises to be a very rich musical seam.

More information here.

11 November 2012

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Albums and Singles

As much as I love Throbbing Gristle, I've long viewed them as a Marcel Duchamp-like entity: bold, brilliant, and hugely influential, but dramatically less potent outside of their original context and in the wake of everyone who later built upon their vision. After a deep re-immersion in their work, however, I can honestly say that several pieces still sound remarkably vital even today and that this album remains a condensed and inspiring blueprint for being awesome (albeit an imperfect one).

Industrial Records

I generally view "greatest hits" albums with apathy (bordering on hostility) whenever "serious" music is concerned, no matter how much irony is involved.  In this case, I was always perplexed by the need to assemble a "best of" retrospective from essentially just two albums (D.O.A. And 20 Jazz Funk Greats) that stand on their own as complete artistic statements and don't need to be culled for their high points.  Also, the aforementioned high points here are somewhat dubious, incomplete, and lean disproportionally heavily towards 20 Jazz Funk Greats: Second Annual Report is only represented by a backwards version of "Slug Bait," which I don't mind terribly much, but D.O.A. is woefully underrepresented (which I do actually mind).  Also, I can't understand how a Throbbing Gristle retrospective can possibly fail to include answering machine recordings of death threats.

Despite all that, I still find this album charming, mostly owing to the exotica-themed art (particularly the picture of the band wearing aloha shirts and grinning) and Claude "Kickboy Face" Bessy's rambling and over-exuberant stream-of-consciousness liner notes.  Also, it admittedly provides a broad-stroke overview of a remarkably varied and innovative career: pre-Sonic Youth guitar noise ("Six Six Sixties," one of my favorites), proto-power electronics ("Subhuman"), twinkling proto-synth pop ("Ab/7a"), queasy faux-dub ("20 Jazz Funk Greats"), proto-techno ("Adrenalin"), and blunt, unapologetic ugliness ("Hamburger Lady").  It is "Hamburger Lady" that might be the single most important piece on the album for me, as it is so beautifully sick, uncomfortable, and self-sabotaging.  I can't think of any other songs that so brazenly make it clear that a band does not care at all whether or not anyone likes them–I still smile every time I hear it.

As this is part of TG's deluxe reissue series, there are some features that differentiate this version from its previous incarnations and make it something of a noteworthy event.  In theory, the big one is that Chris Carter has painstakingly remastered everything.  He did a fine job, of course–the album sounds vibrant and crisp.  However, that only truly matters on the synth-based pop excursions.  It is hard to imagine anybody being especially concerned about the fidelity of grinding, primitivist sludge like "Subhuman" or the dumb, murky rock of "Zyklon B Zombie."

For me, the big surprise was that the CD version contains essentially another full disc of "great hits" and rarities.  There are a couple of alternate mixes that haven't been released before for obsessive fans ("The Old Man Smiled" and "Ab/7a"), but they aren't wildly different from the originals or particularly revelatory in any way.  Still, "The Old Man Smiled" definitely belongs on any Throbbing Gristle retrospective (even if it is basically an alternate version of "Six Six Sixties"), so an injustice has been righted as far as I am concerned.  More important to me is that fact that it compiles a handful of non-album songs from Throbbing Gristle's singles, so Greatest Hits now includes all of them except "Something Came Over Me."  That is obviously quite nice from a convenience and completeness perspective, but one of those stragglers is actually one of my favorite TG songs of all time, the darkly shimmering synth pop of "Distant Dreams (Part Two)."

Also, I was extremely pleased that the one regular album song added to this reissue is "Persuasion," which highlights an aspect of the band that I had forgotten about: Genesis P-Orridge may seem like an affable eccentric now, but he could be an extremely magnetic and unnerving presence in his younger years (particularly when he was at his most deadpan).  It was very easy to understand why Throbbing Gristle were deemed "Wreckers of Civilization" after hearing him lecherously expound on panties.  Being shocking and provocative is always far more effective when it is done in a bored-sounding and casual manner–it seems ingrained and sincere rather than an attention-getting affectation.

There are, of course, several songs that have not aged especially well here.  Also, a lot of the more pop-based themes were later greatly improved upon by Chris and Cosey. And, of course, Peter Christopherson went on to do similarly aberrant, but far more sophisticated work with Coil: this album merely summarizes one early phase in the lives of four individuals that continued to evolve and release compelling work for another three decades.  Nevertheless, Throbbing Gristle achieved an utterly unique chemistry during their best moments that is still apparent today and many of those moments are here: a song like "What A Day" is so viscerally simple in its bludgeoning repetition and directness that it is difficult to envision it ever sounding passé.  This may not be a perfect retrospective (nothing about TG was ever perfect), but it is definitely a very good one and it has never looked or sounded better.

Samples:

• Distant Dreams (Part Two)
• Subhuman
• Adrenalin

 

 

04 November 2012

Administrator

Albums and Singles

"I recorded these songs with cellist Isabel Castellvi in preparation for our fall tour. Some of them were written as part of my current Song-of-the-Week project. Versions on the EP (with the exception of "Trophies") are different than those released through the project."

“Recording with Travis (engineer) and Isabel was enjoyable, ease-y. We recorded the songs live, meaning we played together in the same room, no overdubs. Each take was subtly different, and we might prefer cello on one and vocals on another…but with live recording we gave up perfectionism and listened for spirit."

--Diane

More information here.