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LP
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FH 003LP
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Australian ambient electronic album Green Chaos, reissued for the first time on vinyl LP. Originally released in 1988 on Sydney based private press label Freefall, Green Chaos marks the sole release from Ripley-Marshall. In the late '80s Ripley-Marshall lived a Bohemian lifestyle in inner city Sydney; "surrounded by musicians, actors and artists, there was an amazing creative experimental vibe going on." While playing in new wave/art rock band D Face she began Green Chaos as a personal project to counteract the creative friction sometimes experienced within a group dynamic, heavily inspired by Arnold Frolows' "Ambience" radio show on Australia's Triple J and particularly the music of Tangerine Dream, Harold Budd, and Brian Eno. Initially a solitary endeavor, once she decided to record in a studio Green Chaos morphed into a somewhat collaborative, improvisational project with other musicians invited into the studio to improvise and add their own interpretations and ideas, additional layers and dimensions, resulting in a work that combines a clear influence from the electronic repetition of the Berlin school with a meandering, futuristic lyricism. Although influenced by the long form sonic journeys of artists like Tangerine Dream, Ripley-Marshall's background in art rock and new wave brings a more concise approach, each song a self-contained universe that says only what is necessary in the arrangement. After completing a sound engineering course Ripley-Marshall recorded the album at Sydney's Exeter House Studio over several months alongside studio engineer Andrew Knight, met through a fellow member of D Face. Knight ran Freefall, a private press recording label releasing folk and bluegrass music, which had Green Chaos as its sole ambient release. Ripley-Marshall self-distributed the album to local inner city record stores and dropped a copy to Triple J, where it became a regular staple of Arnold Frolows' show. These days Ripley-Marshall has moved away from music and is predominantly focused on visual art. Green Chaos stands as the only released product of her musical years, both a personal window into the vibrant experimental art scene of late 1980s Sydney and a deep, timeless anomaly of Australian electronic music.
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LP
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FH 002LP
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Ensamble Acústico was conceived in the early 1980s by Billy Pereyra and Eduardo Roland in Blancarena, a resort on the coast of the Río de la Plata, east of Colonia, Uruguay. In 1989, after only a few performances, the duo released their first and only album: a cassette of eight songs titled Un Exceso De Luz ("An Excess of Light"), co-released by independent labels Perro Andaluz (Uruguay) and Circe (Argentina). Despite being limited to just 500 copies the album was critically acclaimed and lauded as the first "new age" project to come out of Uruguay. Yet lumping Un Exceso De Luz into that most vast and heterogenous confluence of musical genres, akin to "world music," dismisses the alchemical breakdown of minimalism with gestures of contemporary jazz, exemplified by the shifting harmonic figures of "En Los Campos de Colonia" ("In the Fields of Colonia"). Pereyra and Roland sound strings in tandem, forming harmonic compositions that generate unexpected resonances. Together they build a climatic character that gives the sound of Ensamble Acústico its most distinctive seal, sharing more with the aesthetics of contemporary jazz than the nebulous new age label. The opening track "Cuando la Nostalgia Guía" ("When Nostalgia Guides") raises not a question so much as a provocation that hints at its own temporal limitations -- as an unfinished sentence. "Reposo de la Hierba" ("Repose of the Grass") meanders through grassy fields before "A Ras de Cielo" ("Flush With Sky") reveals the "Exceso" of the title track. These are the great ungroundings of modernity that saw the heavens open and dissolve the celestial sublime, leaving listeners with a godless excess of space and time. Perhaps "new age" is a more fortuitous classification than we originally suspected. As Roland says, "music is the expression of a new world."
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