Browse by Artist: RAGLANI

Artist:	RAGLANI
Title:	Husk
Label:	ARBOR
Format:	2LP
Price:	$26.00
Catalog #:	ARBOR 126LP

"Husk, a career-spanning double-LP retrospective marking Raglani's 'early period' (2004-2009), is both the artist's 'Best-of' collection, as well as a document of a personal orientation within the canon of electronic music. As a devoted student of E.M. history and synthesis techniques, Joseph Raglani has spent the past decade in his St. Louis studio consuming and refiguring. While highly-informed, these tracks avoid simple derivation, the traces of influence are not easily decipherable; the common descriptors fall away. The sonic legacies orbiting the INA GRM axis cross paths with pop sensibilities more akin to the sensuous pulse of New Order. Raglani mines the expressiveness of this fertile boundary space. The compositions on Husk are dense featuring a palette of analog and digital electronic instruments as well as guitar, voice, pedal steel, organ, melodica. Disparate elements find a way to resonate to maximum emotive effect. The sonic energies are not bound to their sources, but are rather utilized for their ability to express. One fourth of the material is available here for the first time; the remainder from private-press and small run releases has been remixed by Raglani and re-mastered by Greg Davis for presentation in this collection."

Artist:	RAGLANI
Title:	Of Sirens Born
Label:	KRANKY
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	KRANK 124CD

"Situated in the soundworld of contemporary kosmiche electronica, Of Sirens Born goes several steps further than many retro-focused efforts, rendering audibly literal the traditional metaphor of voyage that has underscored so many synth-driven concept albums. Beginning tentatively and uneasily, these five pieces progress through expansive phases of grandeur and menace, shipwrecking before washing ashore on a new world. At the core of the work is the idea of the imaginary vista; high, keening drones issue from the heart of unknown rivers, populated on all sides by fantastically twittering creatures and alien flora, drawing the listener on with the hint of exotic treasure, hidden within forbidding and impossible jungles. Raglani drew the vocabulary of his sonic imagery from films (The New World, Aguirre) and the early Nonesuch documents of 'world music' (especially Peruvian and Andean folk music), distilling from these the dreamwork of epic travel and the alien strangeness of other cultures imagined through legend. Song forms are dissolved here, but still present; electronic and acoustic sources blend seamlessly into majestically glittering waves. Though its indebtedness to the dark romanticism of Krautrock is clear, this is not an electronic trip through well-worn evocations of cosmic space. It is rather a story about the submerged memory of mythic voyages, of a time when every far-off destination was alluring, dangerous, and questionably real, envisioned from the perspective of a world well-mapped and conquered by machines."

Artist:	RAGLANI
Title:	Web Of Light
Label:	KVIST
Format:	LP
Price:	$17.00
Catalog #:	KVIST 002LP

Joseph Raglani : Analog Synth, Sine/Squarewave Generator, Electronics, Tapes, Vocals, Guitar and Places. The record version of Web Of Light is available on KVIST Records. Limited to 500 copies on 140 gram vinyl with pro-printed covers and inserts. "Raglani's use of analogue electronics is tied to traditional Krautrock by a thread of dark romanticism extending, in Germany, back to the work of Caspar David Friedrich. Epic and tumultuous landscapes as images of psychic space; hazardous journeys through awesome and forbidding worlds; the hair-blown viewer looking down onto incredible canyons...The entire extended metaphor of Friedrich's work, linking the arc of a spiritual journey to the beautiful and tumultuous work of nature, is conserved in the work of the kosmische school. Raglani's relationship with the music of Schulze or Fricke is not 'retrospective,' but contemporary. The musical commonalities proceed from a shared commitment to the elaboration of exotic musical spaces, pursued chiefly through melody, adorned by figurative electronic flourishes and concrète motifs. What is missed in alot of drone and noise is the ability of the sound to paint a scene; too often, we're presented with a blandly ecstatic wash of lo-fi murk, more stoned than psychedelic. Raglani avoids these generic limitations by engaging more directly with the tradition to which his peers owe, arguably, the most considerable debt. What he deepens in that tradition is in the abstraction and development of themes--spreading out the narrative through textural variation, rather than driving ever forward through arpeggios and circular rhythms. If Raglani avoids the ascending freakouts of early kosmische music, however, it is because everyday life today is freaked out enough on its own. What is needed, rather, are sounds that can address our already-piqued uncertainty by involving it in a story it might recognize as its own. So there is little here, also, to tether Raglani to the generic vibrations of noise and drone, though he uses some of the machines that make them; instead of any massive simultaneous display, secrets are revealed gradually and cumulatively. Raglani's voice may sound familiar at first, and there is no doubting its context and sources, but the events described by his music trickle out in shapes, and at a pace, uniquely his. The scenes he composes, surreal but distinct, have all the luster of real paint." -- Mike Ferrer.

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