This CD ``remote provinces``, composed of materials recorded in Germany, Belgium, and Poland, mixed in with my own prepared guitar and signal processors, requires with each listening
a process of interpretation. They are not documentaries nor are they pure: I cannot imagine as a naturalist that one edits out impurity. I cannot imagine that as critic of naturalism one edits out impurities. So in some sense it is a work that is in argument with formalist phonography yet it accepts the basic premise which I call ``seeding across time``. My work is a bit like what one might call ``wild-scaping``---allowing urban decay to express itself unchecked while nature takes over. It is in this regard I include ``technical breakdowns``: wrinkles to remain in the table-cloth, stains on the tie or runs in one`s stockings to show through. Some sounds are designed to enter the ``center`` of ego-consciousness, while others seem peripheral. And yet I have invested equal energy in these ``remote`` fringes and I like to imagine the music evolves with your environment and rides on a continuum of sound that surpasses every rendering and is renewed with each listening. The ``remote provinces`` are all around us. They may be places of exile but also places of solitude, introspection and transcendance but they are nevertheless characterized by ruptures and coincidences of attention. Each of us is a remote province integrating and disintegrating, emerging from and immersed in empire. I have tried to build in sound a sense of worlds inside worlds living, at the occasional expense of transparency, transparently.

The continuous presence of the guitar creates the main axis for these improvisations that happened between 2007-2008. Different sound sources, from electronic sounds to the clarinet, and prepared piano interchange roles, swarm around and together with the guitar creating sonic and harmonic fields that oscillate between the spectral and the gestural.


THANOS CHRYSAKIS
VIBRAPHONE
LAPTOP
INSIDE PIANO
PREPARED PIANO

JAMES O`SULLIVAN
GUITAR

DARIO BERNAL-VILLEGAS
DRUMS
INSIDE PIANO
MARIMBA

OLI MAYNE
SYNTHESIZER

JERRY WIGENS
CLARINET

A continuation of the “inscapes” series; a set of compositions based on the structural and aesthetic capacity of sonic matter;
a confluence and at times collision of composed and decomposed sound-spectra, based on field-recordings, synthesized and acoustic sounds.

Profession Reporter - the reference to Michelangelo Antonioni`s 1975 film of the same name is entirely deliberate and for you to figure out - is the latest in a series of works, following on from Warburton`s Walks series and Compendium Maleficarum III (with Frederick Farryl Goodwin), that seeks to further break down the already fragile barriers separating composition and improvisation, natural (field recordings) and man-made (improvised) sound. Sourced from recordings made in Morocco in three different locations at three different times of day - morning, midday, evening - and extracts from live improv concerts in France, featuring Kyle Bruckmann, Bertrand Denzler, Greg Kelley, Jean Sébastien Mariage, Bruno Meillier, Bhob Rainey, Fabrizio Spera and Warburton himself - it`s voyage of discovery across space and time for composer and listener alike.

Using field recordings collected around the world, Kim Cascone has constructed a CD which is neither an exploration of inner space nor a meditation on hearing. It makes no statement nor serves any purpose. It is not a travelogue.
Hopefully, this CD has succeeded in achieving all of those goals.

Palimpsesto is the result of real-time compositions (in other words improvisations); a palimpsest of interwoven sonorities and aural structurings, based on two classes of sounds, electronic, and percussive (pitched/unpitched).
Is music but a palimpsest in the air? A moment to moment of writing and erasing different temporal layers? A coexistence of what we have accumulated, and how we relate, and respond to the instruments and to each other, in the course of a musical encounter? If I was to describe this CD with two words, I would prefer to call it a coloured palimpsest.

Thanos Chrysakis :
vibraphone
live-electronics
marimba
inside/string piano
prepared piano

Dario Bernal-Villegas :
drums
marimba
bass-drum/cymbals
inside/string piano

Oli Mayne :
vibraphone

klage, the first release of AURAL TERRAINS, contains compositions based on a relatively wide range of timbral, rhythmic and melodic material, aiming to achieve a confluence between its structuring forces; acoustic instruments and electronic sounds. It is preferable to be listened to not as separate tracks but as an aural manifold of different distances/proximities, and contours; at times creating a sense of hovering, suspending time, while at others a more directional trajectory.