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viewing 1 To 25 of 302 items
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CD
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KRANK 231CD
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$16.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 5/28/2021
"The latest collection by Cascadian resident loscil aka Scott Morgan is a stunning meditation on light, shade, and decay, sourced from a single three-minute composition performed by a 22-piece string orchestra in Budapest. The subsequent recording was lathe-cut on to a 7-inch, then 'scratched and abused to add texture and color,' from which the entirety of Clara was sampled, shape-shifted, and sculpted. Despite their limited palette, the compositions summon a sense of the infinite, swelling and swimming through luminous depths. Certain tracks percolate over narcoleptic metronomes while others slowdive in shimmering shadowplay, sounding at times like some noir music of the spheres. Although Morgan's compositional premise for Clara was quite defined, the resultant work is wonderfully opaque and spatial, equal parts lush and lurking, traced in fine-grained gradients and radiant silences. The album's title comes from the Latin for 'bright': a fitting muse for this masterpiece of celestial electric currents and interstitial ether, where 'shadows are amplified and bright spots dimmed.'"
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2LP
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KRANK 231LP
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$27.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 5/28/2021
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2LP
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KRANK 212LP
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2021 repress. "This is the first reissue for Tim Hecker's classic 2003 album. The original recordings were remixed by Tim Hecker and mastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy Mastering."
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2LP
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KRANK 211LP
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2021 restock. "This is the first reissue of Tim Hecker's classic 2001 debut full length release. The original recordings were remixed by Tim Hecker and mastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy Mastering."
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LP
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KRANK 230LP
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LP version. "The sublime songs comprising Los Angeles-based musician Ana Roxanne's second record, Because Of A Flower, germinated gradually across five years, inspired by interwoven notions of gender identity, beauty, and cruelty. She describes her process as beginning with 'a drone element and a mood,' then intuiting melody, syllables, and lyrics incrementally, like sacred shapes materializing from mist. The experience of identifying as intersex informs the album on levels both sonic and thematic, from spoken word texts borrowed from tonal harmony textbooks to cinematic dialogue samples and castrati aria allusions. It's an appropriately interstitial vision of ambient songcraft, a chemistry of wisps and whispers, sanctuary and sorrow, conjured through a fragile balance of voice, bass, space, and texture. Despite a background studying at the prestigious Mills College in Oakland, Roxanne's music rarely feels conceptual, instead radiating an immediate and emotive aura, rooted in the present tense of her personal journey. She speaks of the flower in the title as a body, singular and sunlit, as many petals as thorns, an enigma beholden only to itself. But whether taken as surface or subtext, Because Of A Flower is a transfixing document of a rare artist in the spring of their ascension."
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KRANK 230CD
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"The sublime songs comprising Los Angeles-based musician Ana Roxanne's second record, Because Of A Flower, germinated gradually across five years, inspired by interwoven notions of gender identity, beauty, and cruelty. She describes her process as beginning with 'a drone element and a mood,' then intuiting melody, syllables, and lyrics incrementally, like sacred shapes materializing from mist. The experience of identifying as intersex informs the album on levels both sonic and thematic, from spoken word texts borrowed from tonal harmony textbooks to cinematic dialogue samples and castrati aria allusions. It's an appropriately interstitial vision of ambient songcraft, a chemistry of wisps and whispers, sanctuary and sorrow, conjured through a fragile balance of voice, bass, space, and texture. Despite a background studying at the prestigious Mills College in Oakland, Roxanne's music rarely feels conceptual, instead radiating an immediate and emotive aura, rooted in the present tense of her personal journey. She speaks of the flower in the title as a body, singular and sunlit, as many petals as thorns, an enigma beholden only to itself. But whether taken as surface or subtext, Because Of A Flower is a transfixing document of a rare artist in the spring of their ascension."
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2LP
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KRANK 229LP
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Double LP version. "Named after the geographic formations of the seismically volatile Cascadian coastal mountains, loscil's coast/range/ arc// reissue features new artwork and an additional track. Remastered by James Plotkin and available on vinyl for the first time."
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KRANK 229CD
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"Named after the geographic formations of the seismically volatile Cascadian coastal mountains, loscil's coast/range/ arc// reissue features new artwork and an additional track. Remastered by James Plotkin and available on vinyl for the first time."
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LP
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KRANK 044LP
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2020 repress. "Aix Em Klemm is the moniker of the ambient music project consisting of Adam Wiltzie (Stars Of The Lid/A Winged Victory For The Sullen) and Robert Donne (Labradford/Anjou). As Wiltzie told Sadness Is In The Sky fanzine, his collaboration with Donne began when 'we all met during a Texas swing of a Labradford tour that Stars Of The Lid opened for back in 1996. They stayed at my house for a few days and we became close.' A year later Wiltzie was asked to join Labradford for their Mi Media Naranja European tour of 1997 as the sound technician. This tour also included Bruce Gilbert of the legendary band Wire who was the opening act and joined them in the van for the entire tour. With Gilbert's nightly improvisations of minidisk field recording explosions running through a Sherman Filterbank, it left a profound effect on Wiltzie and Donne, and led to inspiring internal philosophical discussions on the importance of improvisation. After concluding six weeks in the van, the idea of creating a unique collaboration separate from their other projects was realized. The duo exchanged tapes over the course of a year and then Donne ventured to Austin, TX for a week to record at Wiltzie's home studio in 1999. The in-person collaboration moved much more quickly than the exchange of tracks by mail. One track on the Aix Em Klemm album, "Sparkwood And Twenty-One", was written and recorded in one day. The duo took the mysterious name Aix Em Klemm and the self-titled debut was released in the autumn of 2000. As of late, Wiltzie lives in Brussels, and Donne joined Stars Of The Lid on their last tour of Europe in 2016 playing modular synth. They still collaborate musically so new Aix Em Klemm recordings remain a possibility."
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KRANK 228CD
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"Melissa Guion's second offering for Kranky retains the glassy gauze of her debut, 2016's Precious Systems, but shaded starker and darker, framed by mechanical rhythms and humid industrial moods. She speaks of Sour Cherry Bell as something of a reckoning with her tools of creation: 'I was curious to see how far I could go with them, even if that meant reaching the ends of their capacity to do what I wanted. But I never exhausted them and they never exhausted me.' Utilizing her trusted combination of instrumentation, Guion tracked the record between her New Orleans home and rehearsal space, capturing chemistries both intimate and expansive. The songs sway between twilit shoegaze, downer ballads, and gothic pop, mapping a delicate palette of electric melancholies, though in retrospect she cites as her primary muse the notion of power: 'lost and found, corporeal and cerebral, harnessed and exploited, of one and many, in this reality and the next.' Sour Cherry Bell reverberates beyond the here and now into scenes unseen, worlds unheard."
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LP
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KRANK 228LP
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LP version. "Melissa Guion's second offering for Kranky retains the glassy gauze of her debut, 2016's Precious Systems, but shaded starker and darker, framed by mechanical rhythms and humid industrial moods. She speaks of Sour Cherry Bell as something of a reckoning with her tools of creation: 'I was curious to see how far I could go with them, even if that meant reaching the ends of their capacity to do what I wanted. But I never exhausted them and they never exhausted me.' Utilizing her trusted combination of instrumentation, Guion tracked the record between her New Orleans home and rehearsal space, capturing chemistries both intimate and expansive. The songs sway between twilit shoegaze, downer ballads, and gothic pop, mapping a delicate palette of electric melancholies, though in retrospect she cites as her primary muse the notion of power: 'lost and found, corporeal and cerebral, harnessed and exploited, of one and many, in this reality and the next.' Sour Cherry Bell reverberates beyond the here and now into scenes unseen, worlds unheard."
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KRANK 227CD
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"The sophomore offering by Julie Carpenter's textural orchestral entity Less Bells takes its title from a storied strain of decorative objects worn in remembrance of lost loved ones: Mourning Jewelry. The album shares a similar mood of devotional pageantry, stirring ornamental laments born from a need to 'create beauty out of grief.' Utilizing an amalgam of strings, synthesizers, and choirs, the pieces ascend and descend in grand, glimmering arcs, ebbing from passages of 'baroque complexity' to expanses of haunting emptiness. Certain songs also skew more overtly western than ever before, deeply reverbed plucks of banjo refracted against glowing horizons of sunrise drone: Americana gone ambient. Furthering the music's mystic intentionality, the track titles comprise 'the major arcana of a tarot deck from an alternate universe,' lorded over by the 'Queen Of Crickets,' ruler of 'The Gates,' 'The Fault,' and 'The Fang.' Even so, the record requires no psychic divination to glean its fragile majesty, its muted tumult of mirage and melody. The beauty it possesses is too blatant, and bountiful."
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LP
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KRANK 227LP
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LP version. "The sophomore offering by Julie Carpenter's textural orchestral entity Less Bells takes its title from a storied strain of decorative objects worn in remembrance of lost loved ones: Mourning Jewelry. The album shares a similar mood of devotional pageantry, stirring ornamental laments born from a need to 'create beauty out of grief.' Utilizing an amalgam of strings, synthesizers, and choirs, the pieces ascend and descend in grand, glimmering arcs, ebbing from passages of 'baroque complexity' to expanses of haunting emptiness. Certain songs also skew more overtly western than ever before, deeply reverbed plucks of banjo refracted against glowing horizons of sunrise drone: Americana gone ambient. Furthering the music's mystic intentionality, the track titles comprise 'the major arcana of a tarot deck from an alternate universe,' lorded over by the 'Queen Of Crickets,' ruler of 'The Gates,' 'The Fault,' and 'The Fang.' Even so, the record requires no psychic divination to glean its fragile majesty, its muted tumult of mirage and melody. The beauty it possesses is too blatant, and bountiful."
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CD
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KRANK 226CD
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"Legendary Dearborn duo Windy & Carl have been crafting inner space electric guitar and bass vistas for nearly three decades now, but their latest feels as vital and vaporous as any peak opus in their vast catalog. Written and recorded across six years, the songs swirl between shoegaze minimalism and stargaze drift, over which Windy Weber whispers veiled poetic narratives of transformation, isolation, and escape. Allegiance And Conviction is their first album since 2012's We Will Always Be. The six compositions are something of outlier in their catalog, shorter in nature than most on their previous releases. All of the tracks are saturated with Carl Hultgren's signature guitar work, intimate constructions of murmurs, drones and his trademark layered filigree, gently amassed into alternately lighter and heavier than air atmospheres. Despite being their first full-length in more than half a decade, the album fully belongs to the bewitching galaxy of sound Windy & Carl innovated and within which they remain the sole occupants: music of thresholds and peripheries and eternities. Allegiance And Conviction is the multifaceted, contemporary take on their sound."
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LP
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KRANK 226LP
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LP version. "Legendary Dearborn duo Windy & Carl have been crafting inner space electric guitar and bass vistas for nearly three decades now, but their latest feels as vital and vaporous as any peak opus in their vast catalog. Written and recorded across six years, the songs swirl between shoegaze minimalism and stargaze drift, over which Windy Weber whispers veiled poetic narratives of transformation, isolation, and escape. Allegiance And Conviction is their first album since 2012's We Will Always Be. The six compositions are something of outlier in their catalog, shorter in nature than most on their previous releases. All of the tracks are saturated with Carl Hultgren's signature guitar work, intimate constructions of murmurs, drones and his trademark layered filigree, gently amassed into alternately lighter and heavier than air atmospheres. Despite being their first full-length in more than half a decade, the album fully belongs to the bewitching galaxy of sound Windy & Carl innovated and within which they remain the sole occupants: music of thresholds and peripheries and eternities. Allegiance And Conviction is the multifaceted, contemporary take on their sound."
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LP
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KRANK 225LP
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LP version. "Legacy Chicago craftsman Mark Nelson's latest offering as Pan American is less a distillation or divergence than it is a return to his musical and spiritual beginnings. Spare, subdued, and largely acoustic, A Son unfurls like late summer dusk on the edge of town, expansive but intimate. Motivated by notions of 'moving backward' and tracing roots -- as well as a couple years of hammered dulcimer lessons -- the album's nine songs were written and recorded in his home in Evanston, Illinois, and honed during a recent solo tour in Europe. The emphasis on uncluttered arrangements and the centrality of the guitar and vocals reveal these songs as the most direct and emotional statement of his career. Nelson cites everything from June Tabor, The Carter Family, Suicide and Jimmy Reed as oblique inspirations, though his truest muse was creative self-inquiry: 'What does music do, Where does music start? How simple can it be? How honest can it be?' After decades of mining post-rock pathways and latticework electronics in Labradford and early Pan American, A Son strips away ornament and distraction in favor of a direct gaze into the heart of what is."
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KRANK 225CD
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"Legacy Chicago craftsman Mark Nelson's latest offering as Pan American is less a distillation or divergence than it is a return to his musical and spiritual beginnings. Spare, subdued, and largely acoustic, A Son unfurls like late summer dusk on the edge of town, expansive but intimate. Motivated by notions of 'moving backward' and tracing roots -- as well as a couple years of hammered dulcimer lessons -- the album's nine songs were written and recorded in his home in Evanston, Illinois, and honed during a recent solo tour in Europe. The emphasis on uncluttered arrangements and the centrality of the guitar and vocals reveal these songs as the most direct and emotional statement of his career. Nelson cites everything from June Tabor, The Carter Family, Suicide and Jimmy Reed as oblique inspirations, though his truest muse was creative self-inquiry: 'What does music do, Where does music start? How simple can it be? How honest can it be?' After decades of mining post-rock pathways and latticework electronics in Labradford and early Pan American, A Son strips away ornament and distraction in favor of a direct gaze into the heart of what is."
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LP
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KRANK 223LP
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"Out-of-print LPs from the critically acclaimed electronic experimental singer/songwriter. Unavailable since 2012.'This sound / synapse transposition is as haunting as it is beautiful -- surely Grouper's best.' --Tiny Mix Tapes. 'If past Grouper releases have inhabited abyssal trenches and damp backwoods, here Harris takes us journeying across constellations and stars. Two of the most beguiling albums of the year, exquisitely realized and singularly evocative.' --The Quietus. 'This music feels both spacey and expansive and also oddly intimate and grounded, the work of someone who has mastered her tools and knows how to get the most out of them.' --Pitchfork. 'Harris finds a way to dive deeper in simple and unassuming ways.' --NPR."
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LP
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KRANK 224LP
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"Out-of-print LPs from the critically acclaimed electronic experimental singer/songwriter. Unavailable since 2012.'This sound / synapse transposition is as haunting as it is beautiful -- surely Grouper's best.' --Tiny Mix Tapes. 'If past Grouper releases have inhabited abyssal trenches and damp backwoods, here Harris takes us journeying across constellations and stars. Two of the most beguiling albums of the year, exquisitely realized and singularly evocative.' --The Quietus. 'This music feels both spacey and expansive and also oddly intimate and grounded, the work of someone who has mastered her tools and knows how to get the most out of them.' --Pitchfork. 'Harris finds a way to dive deeper in simple and unassuming ways.' --NPR."
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2LP
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KRANK 221LP
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Double LP version. "Canadian composer Scott Morgan's 12th long-player as loscil takes its title from an influential series of early 20th century photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, abstracting clouds into miasmic, painterly canvases of smoke and shadowplay. It's a deeply fitting analog for Morgan's own musical process across the past two decades, fraying forms and tones into widescreen mirages of opaque texture and negative space. The name Equivalents referred to Stieglitz's notion of the photographs as being equivalent to his 'philosophical or emotional states of mind;' the same could be said of these eight weighty, shivering chiaroscuros of sound. Each piece unfolds and evolves enigmatically, adrift in low oxygen atmospheres, shifting dramatically from pockets of density to dissipated streaks of moonlit vapor. The entirety of the record was created specifically for the album with the exception of 'Equivalent 7,' which began as a dance score for frequent collaborator Vanessa Goodman. The album version of this track was reworked with Vancouver musician Amir Abbey aka Secret Pyramid. Cloud photographs taken by Scott Morgan at various locations throughout Cascadia in 2018."
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CD
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KRANK 221CD
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"Canadian composer Scott Morgan's 12th long-player as loscil takes its title from an influential series of early 20th century photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, abstracting clouds into miasmic, painterly canvases of smoke and shadowplay. It's a deeply fitting analog for Morgan's own musical process across the past two decades, fraying forms and tones into widescreen mirages of opaque texture and negative space. The name Equivalents referred to Stieglitz's notion of the photographs as being equivalent to his 'philosophical or emotional states of mind;' the same could be said of these eight weighty, shivering chiaroscuros of sound. Each piece unfolds and evolves enigmatically, adrift in low oxygen atmospheres, shifting dramatically from pockets of density to dissipated streaks of moonlit vapor. The entirety of the record was created specifically for the album with the exception of 'Equivalent 7,' which began as a dance score for frequent collaborator Vanessa Goodman. The album version of this track was reworked with Vancouver musician Amir Abbey aka Secret Pyramid. Cloud photographs taken by Scott Morgan at various locations throughout Cascadia in 2018."
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LP
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KRANK 222LP
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LP version. "Jacob Long's reductionist rhythmic ambient vessel, Earthen Sea, ebbs towards a more purely elemental state on his second excursion for Kranky, Grass And Trees. He describes the creative process as one of 'simplifying things as much as possible,' designing uncluttered spaces traced in nothing but breath, field recordings, and 'sounds that could be played by hand but weren't.' The results feel decentralized but dynamic, low-lit evocations of ambiguous nocturnal environments -- dub techno disassembled into stray pulses and spare parts. It's a music both interior and infinite, languorous yet transformative, made in the outer boroughs of a metropolis but existing in its own liminal wilderness. Long's vision is a grounding one, rooted in the physical body but attuned to larger currents: 'In response to living in a fairly hectic city, and at a very hectic time for the world at large, creating something more drawn back and restrained felt appropriate.'"
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KRANK 222CD
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"Jacob Long's reductionist rhythmic ambient vessel, Earthen Sea, ebbs towards a more purely elemental state on his second excursion for Kranky, Grass And Trees. He describes the creative process as one of 'simplifying things as much as possible,' designing uncluttered spaces traced in nothing but breath, field recordings, and 'sounds that could be played by hand but weren't.' The results feel decentralized but dynamic, low-lit evocations of ambiguous nocturnal environments -- dub techno disassembled into stray pulses and spare parts. It's a music both interior and infinite, languorous yet transformative, made in the outer boroughs of a metropolis but existing in its own liminal wilderness. Long's vision is a grounding one, rooted in the physical body but attuned to larger currents: 'In response to living in a fairly hectic city, and at a very hectic time for the world at large, creating something more drawn back and restrained felt appropriate.'"
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KRANK 220CD
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"Anoyo ('the world over there') draws from the same sessions which led to the 2018 work Konoyo but rendered starker, solemn, and stripped back, with more of a naturalist tint. Tim Hecker's processing here moves in veiled ways, soft refractions and whispered shrouds woven within improvisational sessions of traditional gagaku interplay, evoking a sense of vaulted space, temples at dawn, shredded silk fluttering in the rafters. This is boldly barren music, skeletal and sculptural, shaped from wood, wind, strings, and mist. Modern yet ancient, delicate and desolate, Anoyo inverts its predecessor to compellingly conjure a parallel world of illusion, solitude, and eternal return."
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LP
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KRANK 220LP
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LP version. "Anoyo ('the world over there') draws from the same sessions which led to the 2018 work Konoyo but rendered starker, solemn, and stripped back, with more of a naturalist tint. Tim Hecker's processing here moves in veiled ways, soft refractions and whispered shrouds woven within improvisational sessions of traditional gagaku interplay, evoking a sense of vaulted space, temples at dawn, shredded silk fluttering in the rafters. This is boldly barren music, skeletal and sculptural, shaped from wood, wind, strings, and mist. Modern yet ancient, delicate and desolate, Anoyo inverts its predecessor to compellingly conjure a parallel world of illusion, solitude, and eternal return."
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viewing 1 To 25 of 302 items
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