Browse by Label: ANTICIPATE

Artist:	TEMPLETON, MARK
Title:	Standing On A Hummingbird
Label:	ANTICIPATE
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	ANTICIP 001CD

"Mark Templeton's first solo full-length album, and is a fitting beginning for the Anticipate label. Templeton takes various acoustic instruments, most notably guitar, accordion and banjo, and manages to retain their inherent qualities and familiarity, while obscuring their character through digital manipulation and layers of textured static and field recordings. The result is an achingly beautiful set of musings, running through tonal ambience and warm, sweeping electro-acoustics, moments which are abstract and yet hold very concrete emotional motifs, as suggested by the title; a tension between natural fragility, its material fleetingness and the potentialities in its forward gaze, that space in between an understanding and acceptance of reality coupled with a yearning for certain impossibilities. Compositions unravel in linear fashion, straying from flittering granularized shards into clean acoustic progressions with ease, burying and exposing melodies, fraying and outlining edges along the way. Templeton begins each song with delicately strummed chord progressions and improvisations, and then takes them apart, constantly editing and processing until that glimmer shines through, that instant that resonates with him and hints at the song to come, the hope of what the piece can turn into. The final result arrives when the music coincides with the temporal goal, when the sound and the hope of what that sound could be, fall into place together. Templeton himself says it best: 'A piece will often be rewritten numerous times until it begins to take shape. It's often an unintentional note that I overlooked or the whirr of a mini-disc or background noise that comes to the forefront. All the desirable sound is there. It's just a matter of arranging it in the right order.'"

Artist:	PACKARD, MORGAN
Title:	Airships Fill the Sky/Unsimulatable
Label:	ANTICIPATE
Format:	CD/DVD
Price:	$20.00
Catalog #:	ANTICIP 002CD

Morgan Packard's debut solo full-length, Airships Fill the Sky, finds him folding cello, accordion and saxophone into a decidedly digital context -- involving fragmented elements of techno, house, breakbeat-oriented microsound and post-ambient tendencies -- retaining his acoustic sensibilities in earnest, while taking advantage of his long-time immersion in a variety of electronic genres. While he has further honed the melodic, textural meanderings from some of his past work, here Packard returns to his rhythmic roots, and continues to filter his jazz and classical background through everything he does. Deftly using his self-made software techniques, he puts these pieces together with a view towards the hypnotic power of the loop, coupled with a distancing from it. From the opening title track's accordion lines to house bumps, to "Mink Hills" -- with its symphonic clusters sitting harmoniously in layers of horizontal sound and clattering percussion pops -- to the unabashedly funk-filled synth movements of "Waterbugs" -- Packard manages to span a variety of musical choices and retain a coherence throughout. The accompanying Unsimulatable DVD provides a snapshot into the collaboration between Packard and Joshue Ott. Ott uses his homemade software, entitled SuperDraw, to wield a flexible, visual instrument. Using a digital drawing tablet and pen to input simple sketches of lines into the computer, Ott bends these lines to create something far removed from the original input. SuperDraw examines and interprets the constant motion -- both of the hand/stylus as it moves around the tablet, and of the line after it exists inside the software. This analysis allows the creation of movement that is inspired by the results of the original input, lending itself to a cycle of input/output that is consistently influencing and referencing itself. The collaboration between Ott and Packard (which includes almost exclusively different music from the CD) is the culmination of two years of playing live shows together and consistently honing their interaction and the means by which their computers communicate with each other. The DVD portion is in NTSC format, region 0, 36:59 minutes long; the music featured on the DVD is exclusive to this format.

Artist:	SAWAKO
Title:	Madoromi
Label:	ANTICIPATE
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	ANTICIP 003CD

This is Tokyo/NYC-based Sawako's third full-length album, Madoromi, (a Japanese word which loosely translates to the state of being between sleep and waking). Kato Sawako presents a narrative universe of spacy, dreamy in-between-ness. Working through the woozy shift of the album's arc, one emerges at the other end with a return to a physical world decidedly of the present tense. Filled with contrast and dynamics, Madoromi firmly places Sawako at the forefront of the softly-colliding aspects of the digital and organic -- showing that she manages to hang in the fold between these worlds and access each with aplomb. Subtle electronics frame abstracted instrumental source material (vibraphone, guitar, cello, music box) and a variety of real-world sound (random objects, distant, disembodied voices and the occasional presence of Sawako's faintly-whispered vocals). With tracks like "Uta Tane" and "Far Away," she highlights the acoustic elements, rather than obscure the natural beauty of the sound for the sake of finding something new, which helps to further bring out the qualities that were quietly hiding beneath the surface. On songs like "Kira Kira" and the album closer "Tiny Tiny," Sawako uses chimes and tones that twinkle and pop, reminding one of hazy memories recalled through developed and reconfigured memory banks. Existing somewhere between the art gallery, the headphone commute and the bed-time ritual, Sawako's sound traverses boundaries such as digital minimalism, ambient and electro-acoustic -- arriving at a singular approach which feels both mental and tender -- restraining itself from going too far in either direction. Finding the melodies within the melodies, the fragments are assembled into soft, resonating compositions that combine all the fragility of a lone person playing toy instruments in their room with the technological prowess of skilled DSP processing. These qualities add up to a warm, moody, forward-minded balance, which defines Sawako's music.

Artist:	KLIMEK
Title:	Dedications
Label:	ANTICIPATE
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	ANTICIP 004CD

Sebastian Meissner of Frankfurt/Main, is a conceptual media artist, composer, sound designer and photographer, and this is his third full-length release under his Klimek alias, and his first for the Anticipate label. Klimek has been building up his reputation through a slew of releases and compilation appearances on Cologne's revered Kompakt -- an institution as much as a label. Always one to embrace change and a new challenge, Sebastian Meissner realized that the Anticipate label would be an ideal home for the follow-up to 2006's Music To Fall Asleep -- an album that cemented Meissner as one of the most interesting post-Eno composers of narcoleptic yet enthralling drift music. With Dedications, Meissner devotes each track to two of his musical idols, from Michael Gira to Steven Spielberg to Marvin Gaye. But these influences are not simply conglomerated and rehashed into a form of faux-originality; instead, they are distilled and deconstructed until only their purest elements remain. On "For Mark Hollis & Giacinto Scelsi," the opening chord of Hollis' "Colour of Spring," from his faultless self-titled album, is held in stasis to breaking point, exposing every beautiful nuance of what could be described as a "perfect" chord. This slowed-down perception of time is something that haunts all of Meissner's work as Klimek, when he is not busying himself under another of his many aliases including Bizz Circuits, Random Industries and Random_Inc. Rather than just focusing on an aesthetic beauty, upon listening it feels as if there is a greater purpose to this music -- perhaps it exists to remind the listener to slow down and focus on the finer details of their own life, perhaps it is simply a tool to relax the listener into contemplative sleep. Whatever its purpose, in its hazy soundscapes and muffled pianos, Dedications is music with a message.

Artist:	RATTI, NICOLA
Title:	From the Desert Came Saltwater
Label:	ANTICIPATE
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	ANTICIP 005CD

Italian-born multi-instrumentalist and architect, Nicola Ratti, presents his debut for Anticipate. Nicola's music can best be described as warm, subtractive rock, whereby he reduces guitar figures and piano passages into quiet explorations of the hidden corners of an otherwise familiar sound. Guitars twang with slight and spacious percussion and softly hushed (occasional) vocals and atmospheric twinkles congeal into a carefully-composed re-imagining of music. In terms of situating this album in the context of modern electroacoustic music, Nicola uses more natural effects treatments, shying away from fragmentation and processing, which obscures the inherent character of the instruments. Rather, he uses these processes to add depth and subtly tease out the hidden sonorities of his tools of choice, re-composing them and adding atmospherics along the way. By taking advantage of electronic production approaches, Nicola reworks something which is imminently accessible into an album which adds new levels of intangibility -- turning a classic and subdued sound into a future-minded extension, using the acoustics of field recordings and found sounds as instruments in their own right and allowing the harmonies between object and instrument to become more fully-realized. Dynamic and well-balanced, the album maneuvers through full, layered sequences into spare moments of near silence and back again with ease. It isn't a loud-quiet dichotomy, but rather, skillfully placed areas of intimacy. Nicola segues from droning strings and almost invisible vocals to subtly uplifting chords in an almost unnoticeable transition. From the Desert Came Saltwater is an album that sneaks up on the listener -- disappearing and also taking hold without missing a breath. With one solo album on Megaplomb, a handful of single tracks and remixes, and a recent collaboration with producer and engineer Giuseppe Ielasi, Nicola is defined by the excellence of his craft.

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