SHELTER PRESS - Forced Exposure

$26.00 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 5/26/2023

Where Ben Vida's music has previously explored the sound of text at the outer register of electronic composition, here, in collaboration with the Yarn/Wire quartet and the vocalist Nina Dante, the voice and the words it works to inhabit are placed back at the time-scale of a song. There is a familiarity to this music's combination of restrained melody and heightened atmosphere. It feels, softly, like it's made by a band: piano, percussion, voice. A composition kept aloft and even by its four stewards through a simultaneity of effort. The pace, across five pieces, hurries and relaxes but never outruns or distends language. You could find a story in the words being sung, if that's what you need. But there are unfamiliar dimensions too. So many threads, so many timelines. A story or a thousand, or a litany of scraps: language complete but raw, language that can or cannot be translated. Singers fused at the breath. Oppositions or dualities -- a question and an answer, two sides of a conflict, the sense of being here or over there -- are drawn together into a single sentiment, plural with feeling. Voices negotiating in unison how to articulate a stance. Musical cues doling out tension as needed. The five pieces that make up The Beat My Head Hit were developed with Yarn/Wire over the last four years, with roots in Vida's 2018 performance for four voices and electronics 'And So Now' at BAM in Brooklyn. The Yarn/Wire ensemble, founded in 2005, has been collaborating with a broad range of experimental composers and sound artists since its inception: most recently, they have performed work by the likes of Sarah Hennies, Annea Lockwood, Catherine Lamb, and Alvin Lucier. Vida, meanwhile, has maintained a practice as both a musician and a visual artist, which has included drone-leaning solo work for electronics as well as improvisatory collaborations with musicians including Martina Rosenfeld and Lea Bertucci. Working with Yarn/Wire, for Vida, was something like joining a band. Following a few early live performances, the material was worked through in the studio across many permutations, a process during which Vida, Dante, Russell Greenberg, Laura Barger created what Vida calls "a meta-voice out of the blending of our four voices." Sustained presence -- language bringing a group to the place of breathing in unison -- becomes the backbone of the piece.

$22.50 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 5/12/2023

The Concert is the first discographic collaboration between percussionist Alexandre Babel and visual artist Latifa Echakhch. The record is intimately linked to the eponymous exhibition presented at the Swiss Pavilion during the 59th Venice Art Bienniale. For her exhibition in the Swiss Pavilion, Latifa Echakhch created an orchestrated and enveloping experience, a rhythmic and spatial proposal that allowed the visitor a complete perception of time and of his own body. What is the origin of rhythm? How does the body perceive time? How does the mind rearrange it? Can you substitute one perception for another, the visual for the sound? Can fragments of memory go back in time and recreate a different story? Her proposal entered a dialogue with the building around it, designed by Bruno Giacometti. The artist revisited its architectural program as well as the prototypical progression of these exhibition spaces, originally defined for the display of classical art. She appropriated the entirety of the spaces, simultaneously exploring continuity, movement and sequence. Their relationship to light, and the different sounds that emerge from them. Yet the exhibition was entirely silent and the musical composition The Concert functions as its sound rendering, by following a similar path. This one-sided vinyl is a complementary and inseparable partner piece to the exhibition and its eponymous catalog, the latter having been published in April 2022 by Sternberg Press. The music features field recordings made at the Swiss Pavilion itself as well as pre-recorded percussion sounds and significant contributions by the Berlin-based musicians Jon Heilbronn, Rebecca Lenton, Theo Nabicht, Nikolaus Schlierf. The record, available only after the closing of Latifa Echakhch's exhibition offers a concluding phase to the project. The resonance of its sensory score. It reactivates the experience of the physical journey of the installation, without imposing itself as a transcription or an illustration. Through texture, temporality and its totality, the record stands as a resonance of the rhythms that have structured the pavilion, the harmonies that have composed it and the sounds that have inhabited it.

$26.00 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 2/24/2023

Franco-Swiss composer François J. Bonnet, aka Kassel Jaeger, returns to Shelter Press with a new solo album, Shifted in Dreams. Bonnet has been working closely with Shelter Press for several years now, whether as a musician (Zauberberg, Swamps / Things), theorist (The Music To Come), or director of INA GRM (SPECTRES, Recollection GRM, Portraits GRM). Each of these directions taken, each of these actions carried out, is an exploration and an attempt to understand the deep causes of music, its own potential and its possible appearances. Shifted in Dreams is a continuation of such research, but takes a somewhat deviated path. If you use the image of music as a paradoxical mountain, as an unreachable "Mont Analogue", this album tries to opens up a way that at first seems simpler, marked out, known and recognized thanks to the distinct presence of common harmonic and temporal elements. This path, however, is simple only in appearance, for soon it becomes less clear, its contours get blurred, drowned in the mist. Silhouettes form in the distance, like uncertain shadows. You grope your way forward, in this infra-sensitive thickness of the world outside of signs. The recognized markers disappear, giving way, at best, to reminiscences, but increasingly making way to qualities, occurrences, events. You leave the known world of musical codes to join that of sound apparitions, their memorial imprints and the impressions they produce. Following a compositional approach stemming from the musique concrète tradition, without adopting a structuralist aesthetic, Shifted in Dreams explores a wide range of instruments and techniques, going seamlessly from instrumental improvisation to field recording, via micro-editing and the use of asynchronous loops. Mixing the electronic sounds of an ARP 2500 synthesizer with the acoustic drones of a positive organ, articulating guitar layers with the resonance of the Cristal Baschet, bringing together recordings of slamming windows and sound produced by complex modular synthesis patches, Bonnet offers a rich and generous palette of sounds, inviting a constantly renewed sonic investigation. Shifted in Dreams, despite its title, is not a dreamlike record. The dream here does not designate the symbolical space of interpretation and reinterpretation of reality through cultural patterns. It designates the intermediate, blurred and uncertain state where the reality of signs loses its consistency, while, paradoxically, the reality of senses and impressions becomes imperative, obvious. The reality of demons.

$29.50 IN STOCK

Bridging acoustic ecology and interdisciplinary creative practice, Joshua Bonnetta returns to Shelter Press with Innse Gall "The Islands of the Strangers", his second LP for the label. Recorded and assembled between 2017 and 2020 and acting as a companion piece to Bonnetta's film, An Dà Shealladh "The Two Sights", these two interrelated side-long works -- "Innse Gall I" and "Innse Gall II" -- respectively deploy a rigorous approach to field recording and auditory phenomena, pursuing the complex relationship between landscape, place, language, and culture in the Outer Hebrides, where both the film and album's source material was gathered. Since the late 2000s, Canadian artist Joshua Bonnetta has cultivated a highly singular interdisciplinary creative practice that spans film, video, sound, performance, and installation. Bonnetta's use of film, photography, and sound recording operate in close, generative dialog with each other; a photograph indicating the proximity and urgency of sound, a sound indicating the necessity for moving image, and a film utilizing the ocular to forward a realm of sonority. Each discreet element of his output -- a film, record, photograph, etc. -- is regarded as autonomous while interconnected with, and dependent on, other realms of perception and experience; the artist and object acting as a subjective lens, inquiring after the nature of human experience and the diverse, latent psychological realities at juncture of inherited history, culture, place, and self. While very much the byproduct of sound collage, rather than the states of abstraction and "pure" sonority most often pursued by musique concrète, or an experimental music "free of individual taste and memory (psychology)", as pursued by John Cage, Bonnetta's work displays a deeper sympathy with Luc Ferrari's notion of "anecdotal music". Innse Gall comprises two audio works constructed by Bonnetta from field recordings made on the Outer Hebrides islands of Barra, Berneray, North Uist, Harris, and Lewis between 2017-19. Drawing upon Bonnetta's fascination with sound as a primary means to survey place and people, Innse Gall draws upon a vast range of sonorous material: hydrophone recordings made over extended periods in lobster creels and of gases escaping a peat bog, interview fragments, and field recordings feature capturing the sounds of maritime industry, song, seals, corncrake, snipe, and other elements of the natural world. Meticulously collaged and reworked within an exploration of the interrelated acoustic ecology of these diverse elements of the islands' make-up, the album's two works bristle with the subcutaneous narratives embedded within these ancient and modern landscapes, played against the disappearing Gaelic oral traditions which hold their memories, resulting in a deep, auditory reflection on the relationship between narrative, environment, and the reciprocal influences they exact upon one another. Includes heavyweight reverse board inner sleeve; accompanied by a sixty-page booklet containing extensive photographic studies made for The Two Sights by the artist and an essay by Erika Balsom, as well as a postcard to download the film An Dà Shealladh "The Two Sights".

$15.50 IN STOCK

The Palermo born, Munich based composer, Valerio Tricoli, has forged a singular path within experimental sound practice, continuously rethinking the relationship between electroacoustic composition and narrative possibility. Say Goodbye to the Wind is his first album with Shelter Press. Across three intricate, deeply personal works of concrète music, the composer blurs the boundaries between the tangible and abstract, weaving complex allegories for the self. Most commonly created on a RevoxB77 reel-to-reel -- manipulating, live sampling, and real-time editing/mixing of field and studio recordings -- in Tricoli's hands, estranged moments of sonorous ephemera transmogrify and intertwine as metaphorical and allegorical sums, far greater than their parts. The title of Tricoli's sixth full-length is taken from a story by J.G. Ballard, set in the desolation of a holiday resort that rests among a landscape of endless rolling dunes that are populated by "sound sculptures" and monsters. Historically, one of the primary pursuits of musique concrete is the transformation of everyday sonority into abstractions of profound meaning and weight. While this process unquestionable played a heavy hand in the composition of Say Goodbye to the Wind, Tricoli's approach to the idiom sets the stage for something entirely unique. Not only are the practices of tape music applied to field recordings, but to the sounds of piano, synthesizers, objects, and the composer's voice, in addition to interventions by Ecka Mordecai (cello), Lucio Capece (soprano saxophone), and Ida Toninato (vocals). "Lo Spopolatore", draws its title from Samuel Beckett's short story Le Dépeupleur (The Lost Ones). Tricoli's work weaves together a multitude of sonorous fragments: field recordings, voice, and diverse instrumentation. "Mimosa Hostilis" -- the name of a Brazilian plant which contains DMT -- begins with same recording as its predecessor, made of his son's breathing, a few months after his birth, in the Sicilian sea wind. Here, Tricoli treats his sources with pointillistic precision, intermingling vocal and minimal instrumental gestures into a polyrhythmic patter that transforms commonplace sonority into aural echoes of wind, rain, the shadowy species within. The title of "De Vacuum Magdeburgicus" is taken from the name of the first paper published by Otto von Guericke, a 17th century, German scientist, inventor, and politician. While no less oriented around the abstract possibilities activated by field recordings, "De Vacuum Magdeburgicus" is the album's most explicitly musical work. Warbling instrumental sounds and vocal interventions, bent by the hand tape manipulation, push toward heightened states of drama and tension, pushing and pulling against a vast pallet of textures drawn from the natural word and beyond. Artwork by Mårten Lange. Mastered by Rashad Becker.

$31.50 IN STOCK

LP version. "Felicia Atkinson's music always puts the listener somewhere in particular. There are two categories of place that are important to Image Language: the house and the landscape. Inside and outside, different ways of orienting a body towards the world. They are in dialogue, insofar as in the places Atkinson made this record -- Leman Lake, during a residency at La Becque in Switzerland, and at her home on the wild coast of Normandy -- the landscape is what is waiting for you when you leave the house, and vice-versa. Each threatens -- or is it offers, kindly, even promises? -- to dissolve the other. Recognizing the normalization of home studios these days, she revisited twentieth-century women artists who variously chose, and were chosen by, their homes as a place to work: the desert retreats of Agnes Martin and Georgia O'Keefe, the life and death of Sylvia Plath. Building a record is like building a house: a structure in which one can encounter oneself, each room a song with its own function in the project of everyday life. At times listening to Image Language is immediate, something like visiting a house by the sea, sharing the same ground, being invited to witness Atkinson's acts of seeing, hearing, and reading in a sonic double of the places they occurred. In an aching moment of clarity in 'The Lake is Speaking,' a pair of voices emerge out of the primordial murk of piano and organ, accompanying the listener to the edge of a reflective pool that makes a mirror of the cosmos . . . At other times, listening to Image Language is more like being in a theater, the composition a tangle of flickering forms and media that illuminate as best they can the darkness from which we experience it. On 'Pieces of Sylvia,' a noirish orchestra drones and clatters beneath and around a montage of vocal images, stretching the listener across time, space, subjectivities. Atkinson says that Image Language is like the fake title of a fake Godard film. There is indeed something cinematic about Atkinson's work -- not cinematic in the sense that it sounds like the score for someone else's film, but cinematic in the sense that it produces its own images and language and narratives, a kind of deliberate, dimensional world-building in sound. Image Language is built from instruments recorded as if field recordings, sound-images of instruments conjured from a keyboard, instruments Atkinson treats like characters, what she calls 'a fantasy of an orchestra that doesn't exist.' . . . Voice can be a writerly anchor or a wisp of a textural presence. Atkinson's capacious and slippery speech plunges into and out of the compositional depths, shifting shapes, channeling the voices of any number of beings, subjectivities, or elements of her surroundings -- not unlike her midi keyboard, able to speak as a vast array of instruments..." --Thea Ballard (2022)

$16.00 IN STOCK

"Felicia Atkinson's music always puts the listener somewhere in particular. There are two categories of place that are important to Image Language: the house and the landscape. Inside and outside, different ways of orienting a body towards the world. They are in dialogue, insofar as in the places Atkinson made this record -- Leman Lake, during a residency at La Becque in Switzerland, and at her home on the wild coast of Normandy -- the landscape is what is waiting for you when you leave the house, and vice-versa. Each threatens -- or is it offers, kindly, even promises? -- to dissolve the other. Recognizing the normalization of home studios these days, she revisited twentieth-century women artists who variously chose, and were chosen by, their homes as a place to work: the desert retreats of Agnes Martin and Georgia O'Keefe, the life and death of Sylvia Plath. Building a record is like building a house: a structure in which one can encounter oneself, each room a song with its own function in the project of everyday life. At times listening to Image Language is immediate, something like visiting a house by the sea, sharing the same ground, being invited to witness Atkinson's acts of seeing, hearing, and reading in a sonic double of the places they occurred. In an aching moment of clarity in 'The Lake is Speaking,' a pair of voices emerge out of the primordial murk of piano and organ, accompanying the listener to the edge of a reflective pool that makes a mirror of the cosmos . . . At other times, listening to Image Language is more like being in a theater, the composition a tangle of flickering forms and media that illuminate as best they can the darkness from which we experience it. On 'Pieces of Sylvia,' a noirish orchestra drones and clatters beneath and around a montage of vocal images, stretching the listener across time, space, subjectivities. Atkinson says that Image Language is like the fake title of a fake Godard film. There is indeed something cinematic about Atkinson's work -- not cinematic in the sense that it sounds like the score for someone else's film, but cinematic in the sense that it produces its own images and language and narratives, a kind of deliberate, dimensional world-building in sound. Image Language is built from instruments recorded as if field recordings, sound-images of instruments conjured from a keyboard, instruments Atkinson treats like characters, what she calls 'a fantasy of an orchestra that doesn't exist.' . . . Voice can be a writerly anchor or a wisp of a textural presence. Atkinson's capacious and slippery speech plunges into and out of the compositional depths, shifting shapes, channeling the voices of any number of beings, subjectivities, or elements of her surroundings -- not unlike her midi keyboard, able to speak as a vast array of instruments..." --Thea Ballard (2022)

$16.00 IN STOCK

A ritornello that awakens, unfolds, disappears, resurfaces, transforms, forgets itself, awakens again. A ritornello in folds and hollows, which gives us something to see as well as to listen, a theater of acoustic shadows where each timbre, each rhythm, each modulation, is born from a meticulously refined gesture. "I don't write music, it's an assemblage of gestural memories", says Thomas Bonvalet. Gestures found, accidentally or not, through long practice: such keyboard rubs on such guitar while preparing a concert, such tambourine vibrates in a singular way when placed on such amp, the duration and intensity of breath given to the flute so that the strings of the open piano decline and reverberate the harmonics... Gestures that are both very skillful and very simple, that sovereignly refuse the categories of modern and archaic, natural and cultural. Instead, they summon an entire genealogy, both intimate and collective, musical and technical, the memory of a thousand different pieces from a thousand different eras. There is no path, in fact, no path at all in this dismantled world. There are, however, these gestures that allow us to search for the human measure, that allow for a new attention to be given to bodies, objects, space. Gestures that invent new relationships between themselves and other ways of being alive, gestures to be worked on and shared endlessly. "It's fragile, it can always fall apart. I have to fight, to stay in tune with what is at stake in a piece, to breathe into it what will make it stand up. And so, the ritornello continues its mutations in the folds and hollows of our own memories."

$24.00 IN STOCK

LP version. A ritornello that awakens, unfolds, disappears, resurfaces, transforms, forgets itself, awakens again. A ritornello in folds and hollows, which gives us something to see as well as to listen, a theater of acoustic shadows where each timbre, each rhythm, each modulation, is born from a meticulously refined gesture. "I don't write music, it's an assemblage of gestural memories", says Thomas Bonvalet. Gestures found, accidentally or not, through long practice: such keyboard rubs on such guitar while preparing a concert, such tambourine vibrates in a singular way when placed on such amp, the duration and intensity of breath given to the flute so that the strings of the open piano decline and reverberate the harmonics... Gestures that are both very skillful and very simple, that sovereignly refuse the categories of modern and archaic, natural and cultural. Instead, they summon an entire genealogy, both intimate and collective, musical and technical, the memory of a thousand different pieces from a thousand different eras. There is no path, in fact, no path at all in this dismantled world. There are, however, these gestures that allow us to search for the human measure, that allow for a new attention to be given to bodies, objects, space. Gestures that invent new relationships between themselves and other ways of being alive, gestures to be worked on and shared endlessly. "It's fragile, it can always fall apart. I have to fight, to stay in tune with what is at stake in a piece, to breathe into it what will make it stand up. And so, the ritornello continues its mutations in the folds and hollows of our own memories."

$20.00 IN STOCK

The expression "ghost in the machine" emerged within a particular context, namely as a critique of Cartesian dualism's separation of soul and body, and thus served to revive a certain mechanistic materialism. In simple terms, this critique denies the existence of an independent soul (the "ghost") contained in a corporeal organism (the "machine"). It asserts, on the contrary, that the "soul" is just a manifestation of the body -- that ultimately, they are one and the same. The artificial always brings with it the fantasy of emancipation and autonomy, and a break with a supposedly natural order of things. In a certain respect, the domain of musical creation constitutes a kind of front line, at once a terrain of exploration for possible applications of AI and a domain that boasts an already substantial history of the integration of machines and their calculative power into creative processes. From algorithmic composition to methods of resynthesis, from logical approaches to the creation of cybernetic systems, from the birth of computer music to neural networks, for more than half a century now music has been in continual dialogue with the binary universe of electron flows and the increasingly complex systems that control them. Each of the texts included here, in its own way, reveals a different facet of the strange prism formed by this alliance. Each projects its own particular spectrum -- or spectre; each reveals a ghost, evokes an apparition that is a composite of ideas, electricity, and operations. This book, then, does not set out to cut the Gordian knot constituted by the question of the possible mutations and becomings of binary logic, and in particular its most recent avatar, AI. On the contrary, it seeks to shed a diverse light upon the many possible ways of coming to grips with it today, and upon the dreams, promises, and doubts raised by these becomings, whether actualized in the creation of codes and programs to assemble sounds or infusing a whole compositional project. Above all, though, what is at stake here is to discover how these developments resonate together, and how this resonance manifests itself through all these approaches, all these reflections, all these modes of creation and of living. For the artificial, the artefact, is always the extro-human brainchild of a human, all too human dream. Authors: Keith Fullerton Whitman, Émilie Gillet, Steve Goodman, Florian Hecker, James Hoff, Roland Kayn, Ada Lovelace, Robin Mackay, Bill Orcutt, Matthias Puech, Akira Rabelais, Lucy Railton, Jean-Claude Risset, Sébastien Roux, Peter Zinovieff.

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When words trail off at the beginning of claire rousay's Everything Perfect Is Already Here, ornate instrumentation is waiting to fill a void left by the breakdown of language. Yet it becomes clear as you trace rousay's collaged sonic pathway that breakdown, of meaning and also of melody, is also a place to rest. Everything Perfect... is made up of two extended compositions that cycle between familiarity and unknowing. There are seemingly infinite ways to feel in response to these pieces of music, which shift tone across their languid duration, earnest like a familiar song but unbound from the emotional didacticisms of lyrical voice and pop form. rousay builds a fluid landscape around the acoustic contributions of Alex Cunningham (violin), Mari Maurice (electronics, violin), Marilu Donovan (harp), and Theodore Cale Schafer (piano), whose respective melodies weave gently in and out, sometimes steady, sometimes aching, sometimes receding altogether in deference to less overtly musical sounds. That is, percussive texture in the form of unvarnished samples and field recordings: the rattle and rustle and the stops and starts of life unfurling, voices sharing memories nearly out of reach, doors closing, wind against a microphone. Everything comes from somewhere in particular, possessing the veneer of the diaristic, but sound's provenance is secondary here and so these details become tangled and fused. Such details sound not as individual ornaments or stories but the collective architecture of the greater composition. It's an architecture that is not quite formed and thus full of openings out to the world unfolding. "The world unfolding," that's a kind way of saying change, movement, loss, transformation. Things rousay here indexes, not without shards of desire or pain, still somehow what I hear is coarse peace in the in-between. Everything Is Perfect Is Already Here is loose and beautiful in surprising ways. The music guides a certain experience of the world around. In claire's music there is this marriage -- not just a pairing or juxtaposition but an interrelationship, an eventual confusion -- of song/texture, narrative/abstraction, figure/ground. Everything comes from somewhere in particular but not just the voices, the field recordings, the what is being said or meant, what matters is "the where you are now". There are so many ways of anchoring oneself in the present, some have to do with fantasy or storytelling and some with accepting what is. These two compositions find peace between these modes. They sweep you away and then bring you to earth, but which is which, anyway? Their mode of feeling is inquisitive.

$24.00 NOT IN STOCK

Sold out, LP version; repress not available until May 2023. When words trail off at the beginning of claire rousay's Everything Perfect Is Already Here, ornate instrumentation is waiting to fill a void left by the breakdown of language. Yet it becomes clear as you trace rousay's collaged sonic pathway that breakdown, of meaning and also of melody, is also a place to rest. Everything Perfect... is made up of two extended compositions that cycle between familiarity and unknowing. There are seemingly infinite ways to feel in response to these pieces of music, which shift tone across their languid duration, earnest like a familiar song but unbound from the emotional didacticisms of lyrical voice and pop form. rousay builds a fluid landscape around the acoustic contributions of Alex Cunningham (violin), Mari Maurice (electronics, violin), Marilu Donovan (harp), and Theodore Cale Schafer (piano), whose respective melodies weave gently in and out, sometimes steady, sometimes aching, sometimes receding altogether in deference to less overtly musical sounds. That is, percussive texture in the form of unvarnished samples and field recordings: the rattle and rustle and the stops and starts of life unfurling, voices sharing memories nearly out of reach, doors closing, wind against a microphone. Everything comes from somewhere in particular, possessing the veneer of the diaristic, but sound's provenance is secondary here and so these details become tangled and fused. Such details sound not as individual ornaments or stories but the collective architecture of the greater composition. It's an architecture that is not quite formed and thus full of openings out to the world unfolding. "The world unfolding," that's a kind way of saying change, movement, loss, transformation. Things rousay here indexes, not without shards of desire or pain, still somehow what I hear is coarse peace in the in-between. Everything Is Perfect Is Already Here is loose and beautiful in surprising ways. The music guides a certain experience of the world around. In claire's music there is this marriage -- not just a pairing or juxtaposition but an interrelationship, an eventual confusion -- of song/texture, narrative/abstraction, figure/ground. Everything comes from somewhere in particular but not just the voices, the field recordings, the what is being said or meant, what matters is "the where you are now". There are so many ways of anchoring oneself in the present, some have to do with fantasy or storytelling and some with accepting what is. These two compositions find peace between these modes. They sweep you away and then bring you to earth, but which is which, anyway? Their mode of feeling is inquisitive.

$24.00 IN STOCK

Over the last five years, the duo of Félicia Atkinson and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma have intertwined sublime sonorities across the geographic expanses between their respective homes in France and the United States. Their third album for Shelter Press, Un Hiver En Plein Été ("A winter in the middle of summer") -- the first to have been largely recorded by Atkinson and Cantu-Ledesma together in the same space -- distills a mesmerizing pallet of acoustic and electronic sources into an open discourse of radically poetic forms. Both veteran experimentalists with celebrated bodies of solo work behind them -- each traversing the challenges of electroacoustic practice in their own singular ways -- prior to their first recorded outing in 2016 (SHELTER 070LP), Félicia Atkinson and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma had only crossed paths in person once, initially meeting in San Francisco during 2009. The mutual bond formed during that brief encounter flowered into their first LP, Comme Un Seul Narcisse, followed two years later by 2018's Limpid As The Solitudes (SHELTER 101LP). Both recorded remotely, these two albums were guided by impassioned conceptual nods to Guy Debord, Baudelaire, Brion Gysin and Sylvia Plath, while seeking resolutions for the challenges and unique possibilities that working at a distance provoked. Un Hiver En Plein Été culminates as a celebration of closeness, a result of Atkinson and Cantu-Ledesma working together in the studio, responsively in real time, for the first time. Recorded in Brooklyn during August of 2019 -- a handful of months before the pandemic would impose chasmic distances across the globe -- its six discrete works, carefully crafted and finalized over the ensuing year, evolve seamlessly across the album's two sides, weaving a sprawling tapestry of sonority, within which both artists retaining their own voices and visions, while drawing each other towards uncharted ground. Atkinson likens the recording of Un Hiver En Plein Été to have been akin to "a playground", each artist "hungry for each sound, a bit like the rush in the Louvre in Godard's Bande à part", to which Cantu-Ledesma adds that the process seemed to have had "a mind of its own", with both "along for the ride". This organic sense of entropy and enthusiasm -- a joyous exploration of the unknown -- guides the momentum of the album's evolving arc. Un Hiver En Plein Été is crafted from deconstructed melodic elements and drifting long-tones -- laden with subtle nods to Indian classical ragas and free jazz -- searching patterns of speech, textural elements captured within the studio and the outside world, and searching tonal and percussive interventions.

$24.00 IN STOCK

Both noted for strikingly forward-thinking bodies of solo work dating back to the 1990s, the duo of Andrew Pekler and Giuseppe Ielasi -- collaborators for the better part of a decade -- reemerge with Palimpsests, their first outing with Shelter Press. Built from deconstructed layers of texture, tone, and arrhythmic percussiveness, the album's two sides distill six years of work into nine splintered, airy re-imaginings of minimalism -- each surprising, creatively rigorous, and startlingly beautiful -- that rest at the outer reaches of contemporary electroacoustic practice and musique concrète. Based in Berlin and Milan respectively, Andrew Pekler and Giuseppe Ielasi have individually carved singular paths across numerous disciplines within experimental music for more than 20 years, each deploying sampling, synthesis, and acoustic sources to weave their own, distinct worlds of sonorous abstraction. Brought together by years of friendship and a shared devotion to layered texture and complex, fractured structure, the pair first joined their creative energies in 2013, a collaboration that culminated as the LP, Holiday For Sampler (PLANAM 024LP), issued by Planam.

Palimpsests, the duo's second outing, draws its material from a series of improvisations made by the Pekler and Ielasi in Milan during 2015. Over the ensuing six years, those recordings would undergo various transformations -- cut, reworked, sampled, and added to by each artist, working at geographic distance between Berlin, Kyoto and Monza -- before culminating, like the album's title suggests, as a unique manifestation of musical palimpsest; "an object reused and altered, while still bearing visible traces of its earlier form." With each of the album's compositions nodding toward a city with which Pekler and Ielasi hold biographical connections, Palimpsests constructs sound as poetic metaphor; a series of ghosts -- traces of memory, image, and action -- cut and reassembled, in cycling permutations, before been set into action at a glacial pace with layered, transparent forms. Defined by remarkable restraint and pointillistic precision, across the album's two sides Pekler and Ielasi weave the fractured remnants of their sessions -- reduced to glitches and warbling fragments of texture and tonality -- into pulsing expanses of spatial ambiance that defy imagism, blur the boundaries between the synthetic and organic -- reducing their sources to a series of unknowns -- recast the boundaries of electroacoustic practice on markedly singular terms. Printed inner and outer sleeves by Traianos Pakioufakis.

$23.50 IN STOCK

Pilled Up on a Couple of Doves is the debut full-length by PDP III, who fell into alignment in December of 2018 amid a handful of immersive and improvisatory recording sessions held at Gary's Electric Studio in Brooklyn, New York. The trio is a collaboration between composer/producer Britton Powell and two Berlin-based artists, the British composer/cellist Lucy Railton and the electronic artist Brian Leeds (Huerco S). At the outset of these sessions Powell presented a series of compositional sketches anchored around multi-tracked electronics and acoustic percussion. These concepts were then used as the framework for collective improvisation, with the musicians working on instinct and layering as many as eight separate takes across a track. A portion of the record also reflects moments that are purely spontaneous -- in-the-moment invention with Railton on electronics and cello and Powell and Leeds working on laptop computers. The composition process involved little in the way of overt instruction, instead favoring discussion on more abstract notions of feel and energy. As a result, the final product was a bit surprising to all involved. "I don't think the three of us had any idea how heavy and physical this thing was going to feel," reflects Powell. Subsequently reduced, edited, and collaged by Powell over the next two years, Pilled Up on a Couple of Doves presents a succession of alien moods. Gauzy textures are buoyed by extreme low-end pressure. Serene industrial hum illuminates the rhythmic beating of waveforms. The sounds frequently evoke opposing emotions -- tenderness and anxiety, claustrophobia and transcendence. The record culminates in 20-minute closer "49 Days," where gradually unfurling textures for cello and electronics mirror the overtones of a ringing gong. It's unsettling, but deeply meditative. A map of liminal space. Music to get lost to. "One thing that's important in relation to my work with music is to access a place outside of physical space," says Powell. "To pursue music as a tool to reach a place outside of physical existence. There's something really simple, innocent, and timeless about working with acoustic percussion instruments," explains Powell. "I think that they allow for a very true examination of sound. It feels vulnerable and really powerful at the same time."

$23.50 IN STOCK

Lake From The Louvers is a new solo work for concrete sounds, electronics and instruments from Australian composer-performer James Rushford, who has spent the last fifteen years honing his singular approach to composition and performance through solo works and collaborations with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Crys Cole, Will Guthrie, Graham Lambkin, and Klaus Lang. Created primarily during a stay at the La Becque Artist Residency on the shores of Lake Geneva, Lake From The Louvers draws inspiration from the play of shadow and light on both the surface of the lake and the window through which Rushford viewed this lacustrine landscape. While the lake is itself at times directly audible in the form of field recordings, the image suggested by the record's title is less directly represented than translated into sonic structures inspired, as Rushford explains, by "the passing of shadow through a fixed space." The movement of light across these two flat surfaces, lake and window, finds its sonic equivalent in these eleven pieces, in which fragments and particles of sound -- highly amplified crunches, synthesized squawks and pings, harp notes -- ripple across the length of each track. Fixed sets of elements define each piece, often molded into ephemeral ensembles in which individual voices consistently fade away and reappear. Rushford's performances on various keyboards provide the unstable, wavering foundations of many of these pieces, with microtonal tunings adding a woozy, seasick edge to his stately, often stunningly beautiful playing. Each side of the LP ends with an extended keyboard work: the first for groaning, sighing church organ, the second for a psychedelic cloud of detuned synthesizer tones in which harmonic fragments sink into their own melancholic recollection. Elsewhere the record makes use of elements as varied as microtonal harp, skittering drum machines and synthetic marimba, establishing a sound palette remarkable for its breadth, as well as its sparkling, glittering quality. Where many of Rushford's solo projects have taken the form of long works with a somber cast, Lake From The Louvers is strikingly bright and accessible, a series of sonic glimpses in which, like a late Monet, the shimmer of light undoes the distinction between image and reflection, foreground and background, surface and depth.

$18.00 IN STOCK

Shelter Press release of Perceptual Geography, Thomas Ankersmit's latest record. The music was created as a loosely structured piece for live performance in 2018-2019, commissioned by CTM in Berlin and Sonic Acts in Amsterdam, and premiered there on the GRM Acousmonium. The music is inspired by -- and dedicated to -- the pioneering research of American composer and installation artist Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009), and created entirely on the Serge Modular analog synthesizer. Ankersmit and Amacher first met in New York in 2000, and kept in touch over the following years. Her concerts and installations left a deep impression on him. Amacher, being close to the Tcherepnin family, also first introduced Ankersmit to the Serge synthesizer, developed by Serge Tcherepnin in the 1970s. In the piece, Ankersmit explores different "modes" of listening: not just which sounds are heard and when, but also how and where sounds are experienced (in the room, in the body, inside the head, far away, nearby). So-called otoacoustic emissions (sounds emanating from inside the head, generated by the ears themselves) play a prominent role. When turned up lou material moves beyond the loudspeakers and starts to trigger additional tones inside the listener's head; tones that are not present in the recorded music. Cupping the ears with the hands and slight movements of the head also help to bring these tones to life. Maryanne Amacher was the first artist to systematically explore the musical use of these phenomena, often referring to them as "ear tones". The title is a reference to Amacher's essay "Psychoacoustic Phenomena in Musical Composition: Some Features of a Perceptual Geography", and despite the all-electronic instrumentation, a dramatic sense of landscape and environment often emerges. There are sparks of fire, howling wind, distant thunder, a swarm of bats disappearing into the distance. Ghostly, floating tones are contrasted with highly dynamic sounds darting around the listener, and large, heavy waves rolling in slowly. "Ear tone" stimuli weave in and out of these textures, emerging from them. Once or twice, the music seems to completely freeze in time, but a slight movement of the listener's head reveals changes. For each live performance, Ankersmit tunes his instrument to the resonant characteristics of the performance space, so that the sounds activate the structure, traveling through the architecture and setting it in motion. The record is accompanied by an extensive conversation between Ankersmit and Serge Tcherepnin, creator of the Serge Modular and friend and collaborator of Amacher.

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Since 2017, Deathstar has been a project about the microphone -- in Marina Rosenfeld's hands, a void, a mirror, an unruly instrument of transformation and mediation. This music is heard in traces, through thickly amplified silences punctuated by momentary eruptions of noise or a voice at the threshold of intelligibility. The sculpture at the center of the action -- a plexiglas orb housing a seven-microphone array originally installed as part of an exhibition the artist mounted at Portikus, in Frankfurt Germany -- performs a recursive operation, listening to and recirculating sounds continuously morphed by feedback and reflection. This machine music repeats itself in seemingly endless versions, abstractly and in an evolving relationship to the grammars of reproduction and performance, presence, absence, and accumulation. Later, recorded traces of this installation rendered as musical notation produce a series of events -- concerts that explore the outcomes of the acts of amplifying, writing, and listening. The four sides of the album Deathstar follow four such events: first, the installation of the Deathstar in exhibition space; then, a piano performance, also within the Deathstar's machinic environment, of a recording of the installation that Rosenfeld notated on paper; then, her re-notation of these recorded traces in the form of a concerto for piano and chamber orchestra, all aggressively amplified through a wall of guitar amps; and finally, the orchestration's reduction to something like chamber music, with acoustic instruments tasked with the representation of an ever more attenuated body of traces. Throughout, the extraordinary virtuoso pianist Marino Formenti and ensembles MusikFabrik (Cologne) and Yarn/Wire (New York) extract a dazzling variety of sounds from their readings of the work's written and acoustic forms. Deathstar is a complex and monumental work from a composer who has long explored the limits of form as an artist and as a listener.

$23.50 IN STOCK

The music of Naarm/Melbourne composer Lisa Lerkenfeldt channels a unique wavelength of foreboding, interstitial electronics, incorporating strategies of musique concrète threaded with veiled currents of melody and hypnosis. Recent recordings for Vienna Press, Longform Editions, and Aught Void have demonstrated different depths of process and finesse but her latest, Collagen, captures perhaps the most complete and complex manifestation of her craft to date. Drawing on a disciplined palette of peach wood combs, contact microphones, piano, strings, and feedback, the album moves in low, looming arcs, ascending to strange purgatories of opaque atmosphere. Lerkenfeldt cites a core aspiration to "elevate the everyday," transforming common objects into otherworldly sound sources, which colors Collagen with a beguiling tactility, like vibrations traced in sand. The tracks shift in frequency and feeling, alternately heady and bodily, acoustic and synthetic, isolated states of static, light, and undertow skirting the outer rings of ambient, noise, and modern composition. Although each piece exists in its own rare air the composite panorama they present is striking in its sweep and subtlety. Lerkenfeldt's muse seems one of evasion as much as evocation, navigating negative spaces for their subliminal whispers of dread or beauty. It's an aesthetic both ascetic and exploratory, minimalist mirages of resonance, texture, and gravity skewed through the pensive glow of room tone. But Lerkenfeldt is too versatile an artist for purist restraint, which Collagen demonstrates dramatically in its closing cut, "Champagne Smoke." A quivering bowed eulogy ebbs under a flickering film of distortion, slowly swelling in sorrow until suddenly the screech goes silent, revealing a murmuring phantom haze hidden beneath the strings, like a specter lost in an abandoned house. 14 Gestures associated with this album will be performed in experimental film and online viewing room of graphic notation from July 29th to October 29th, 2020. Designed by Bartolomé Sanson with art by Lisa Lerkenfeldt, housed in reverse-board inner and outersleeve. Includes a 16-page limited edition score book. Mastered and cut by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering.

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Limited restock. To resonate: re-sonare. To sound again -- with the immediate implication of a doubling. Sound and its double: sent back to us, reflected by surfaces, diffracted by edges and corners. Sound amplified, swathed in an acoustics that transforms it. Sound enhanced by its passing through a certain site, a certain milieu. Sound propagated, reaching out into the distance. But to resonate is also to vibrate with sound, in unison, in synchronous oscillation. To marry with its shape, amplifying a common destiny. To join forces with it. And then again, to resonate is to remember, to evoke the past and to bring it back. Or to plunge into the spectrum of sound, to shape it around a certain frequency, to bring out sonic or electric peaks from the becoming of signals. Resonance embraces a multitude of different meanings. Or rather, remaining always identical, it is actualized in a wide range of different phenomena and circumstances. Such is the multitude of resonances evoked in the pages below: a multitude of occurrences, events, sensations, and feelings that intertwine and welcome one other. Everyone may have their own history, everyone may resonate in their own way, and yet we must all, in order to experience resonance at a given moment, be ready to welcome it. The welcoming of what is other, whether an abstract outside or on the contrary an incarnate otherness ready to resonate in turn, is a condition of resonance. This idea of the welcome is found throughout the texts that follow, opening up the human dimension of resonance, a dimension essential to all creativity and to any exchange, any community of mind. Which means that resonance here is also understood as being, already, an act of paying attention, i.e. a listening, an exchange. Addressing one or other of the forms that this idea of resonating can take on (extending -- evoking -- reverberating -- revealing -- transmitting), each of the contributions brought together in this volume reveals to us a personal aspect, a fragment of the enthralling territory of sonic and musical experimentation, a territory upon which resonance may unfold. The book has been designed as a prism and as a manual. May it in turn find a unique and profound resonance in each and every reader. Features writings by: Jean-Luc Nancy, Tomoko Sauvage, Christian Zanési, Maryanne Amacher, Christina Kubisch, Okkyung Lee, David Toop, Pali Meursault, David Rosenboom, Chris Corsano, Ellen Fullman, and The Caretaker. Editors: François J. Bonnet, Bartolomé Sanson. Binding: thread-sewn metallic softcover; Size: 135 x 200 cm; Page count: 196 pp.; First edition: 2500 copies; Language(s): French/English. Published by Shelter Press with the support of INA GRM.

$11.00 IN STOCK

This is not a study. It is a manifesto for a peculiar conviction: that music remains to be discovered, that it is still hidden. That, nonetheless, it does sometimes appear, but most often incompletely and unevenly. And that what we have hitherto referred to as "music" is in fact only a preliminary, a prodrome. That all musics produced up until now have been nothing but simulacra, rituals to call music forth. This may sound crazy, and indeed unwelcome. But the sole concern of the following text will be to make this statement legible, understandable, and perhaps even to some extent acceptable. Its hope is that, setting out from a few intuitions, the possibility of a music to come can be formulated. That this obscure becoming will emerge, one trait at a time; that the shape of this music to come will reveal itself, gradually, by way of a cluster of assumptions, the reading of a multiple history, and the examination of damaging paradigms that have taken music far from itself. That the subjectivity of a writing, with all of its beliefs, its errors, its biases, its injustices and its shaky certainties, may yet manage to cast a singular and inspiring light upon the idea of music -- this, ultimately, is the ambition of the lines to come. 56 pp; cover thread sewn silkscreened softcover; 11x16 cm.

François J. Bonnet is a Franco-Swiss composer, writer and theorist based in Paris. He's the Director of INA GRM and also produces radio shows for national radio France Musique. His music, often released under the Kassel Jaeger project name, has been presented worldwide.

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Over the last decade, Kassel Jaeger, the moniker of the Paris-based composer, writer/theorist, producer, and director of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), François Bonnet, has meticulously sculpted a body of multidisciplinary work that rests at the forefront contemporary electronic and electroacoustic practice. Jaeger's work across numerous fields, be it in text, action, or sound presents a crucial bridge between the optimistic, philosophical origins of electronic and electroacoustic music, the present and where they have yet to delve. With his first solo LP with Shelter Press, Swamps / Things, Kassel Jaeger wades into this foggy, conceptual realm. From memory and metaphor -- sliding fluidly through the imagistic and emotive -- emerges an immersive, cavernous world that rethinks electroacoustic music on organic terms. Swamps / Things was conceived as an opera without distinct characters or text. It draws Kassel Jaeger into his own history, experiences, and the unlikely double of the swamp, a landscape that has held literal and metaphorical sway over him since childhood. Merging eight works as a total environment, abstaining from distinct shape or discrete articulation, across the album's breadth, sound becomes a shifting mirror for the bubbling, ordered chaos of organic life. Resting at the junction of concept, emotion, and phenomena, Swamps / Things encounters an artist of remarkable craft, delving toward the unknown, deploying organized sonority as object and environment, as much as action, movement, passage, and arc. Seemingly possessed by an entropy entirely its own, the temporal gives way to the poetics of space, while the density of an endlessly evolving climate, laden with cacophonous happenings, renders itself still. Flickering images of the natural world -- memory and the imagined reformed as sound - present an operatic double for human action and thought. From deep, fog like banks of minimalist long tone, to industrial clamors left as tracks in the mud, or the collisions of shifting pulses, overtones, and textures -- captured from across the murky, drone laden waters between the acoustic and synthetic realms -- moody, howling cries and tense meditations merge in ambient sheets, capturing a fleeting image of where decomposition gives way to new growth. Swamp / Things features contributions from Jim O'Rourke and Lucy Railton. Jaeger has previously collaborated with Stephen O'Malley, Stephan Mathieu, Akira Rabelais, Oren Ambarchi, James Rushford, and others. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi, cut at Dubplates & Mastering. Printed artwork by Cameron Jamie on inner and outer reverse-board jackets.

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2022 restock. Springing from body of work spanning decades, defined by a rigorously singular and adventurous approach to sound, cellist, composer, and improvisor, Okkyung Lee, returns with Yeo-Neun. Her first outing with Shelter Press, and arguably her most ground-breaking and unexpected album to date. A vital force in the contemporary global landscape of experimental music, Okkyung Lee is widely regarded for her solo and collaborative improvisations and compositions, weaving a continuously evolving network of sonority and event, notable for its profound depth of instrumental sensitivity, exacting intellect, and visceral emotiveness. Yeo-Neun, recorded by Yeo-Neun Quartet -- an experimental chamber music ensemble founded in 2106 and led by Lee on cello, featuring harpist Maeve Gilchrist, pianist Jacob Sacks, and bassist Eivynd Opsvik -- represents the culmination of one of longest and most intimate arcs in her remarkable career. A radical departure from much of the experimental language for which she has become widely known, it is equally a fearless return. Yeo-Neun loosely translates to the gesture of an opening in Korean, presenting a window into the poetic multiplicity that rests at the album's core. Balanced at the outer reaches of Lee's radically forward-thinking creative process, its ten discrete works are born of the ambient displacement of musician's life; intimate melodic constructions and deconstructions that traces their roots across the last 30 years, from her early days spent away from home studying the cello in Seoul and Boston, to her subsequent move to New York and the nomadism of a near endless routine of tours. At its foundation, lay glimpses of a once melancholic teen, traces of the sentimentality and sensitivity (감성 / Gahmsung) that underpins the Korean popular music of Lee's youth, and an artist for whom the notions of time, place, and home have become increasingly complex. Elegantly binding modern classical composition and freely improvised music with the emotive drama of Korean traditional music and popular ballads, the expanse of Yeo-Neun pushes toward the palpably unknown, as radical for what it is and does, as it for its approachability. Meandering melodies, from the deceptively simple to the tonally and structurally complex, slowly evolve and fall from view, the harp, piano, and bass forming an airy, liminal non-place, through which Lee's cello and unplaceable memories freely drift. Printed inner and outer sleeve with artwork by American photographer Ron Jude. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker.

$27.50 IN STOCK

Speaking And Listening is a book conceived by the artists Yann Sérandour, Félicia Atkinson, Julien Bismuth, and the curator Sophie Kaplan, revolving around questions of narrative, listening and improvisation. It is the last episode in the cycle While I was also listening [...], developed in 2017 and 2018 at La Criée contemporary art center in Rennes, which included in-house and off-site events in the form of exhibitions, events, and residencies. At the art center, five group and solo exhibitions with their associated events succeeded and dialogued with one another, providing both specific and general perspectives onto different forms of narration. The cycle was accompanied by an extra muros program that unfolded at different times and in different locations: concomitant residencies in Bretagne and the US, a project of research/action at the Kandinsky Library of the Musée national d'art Moderne in Paris, a period of research at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and a series of events in Los Angeles and New York (Human Resources, County Museum of Art, Hammer Museum Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Artist's Institute and Emily Harvey Foundation, New York). In the continuum of these experiences, the book has been designed to be a distinct voice, generating new contents appropriate to the medium. The book is centered around a long unpublished transcript of a talk poem by the American poet and performance artist David Antin, entitled framing and being framed. Adding to the corpus of Antin's works, this typically autobiographical text reveals Antin's eloquent use of quotidian events to philosophical ends. The contributions that respond to Antin's text are themselves innovative, composed by poets, thinkers and artists from different generations and nationalities, linked by their common interest in investigating questions of orality, listening, narrative, transmission, improvisation, translation, utterance and enunciation. speaking and listening thus defines the contours of a transatlantic and intergenerational scene, for whom the work of art -- in dialogue with its viewers, readers, and listeners -- is an object to be redefined, retold and replayed again and again. Features: David Antin, François J. Bonnet, David Horvitz, Julien Bismuth, Yann Sérandour, Hanne Lippard, Christian Xatrec, Félicia Atkinson, Christine Sun Kim, Charles Bernstein, and Sophie Kaplan. 240 pp. thread-sewn softcover with flaps; Size: 170x227mm; Language(s): English.

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Double LP version. Printed artwork on inner and outer reverse-board jackets. French poet and ASMR auteur Félicia Atkinson has frequently fixated on the elusive interwoven relationship between microcosms and macrocosms -- how even the quietest creative act ripples outward, a whisper with no fixed meaning. The Flower And The Vessel pursues this notion in a more literal fashion, as it was crafted while pregnant on tour. She describes it as "a record not about being pregnant but a record made with pregnancy." Each day and night, finding herself far from home, she asked herself "What am I doing here? How can I connect myself to the world?" The answer gradually revealed itself: "With small gestures: recording my voice, recording birds, a simple melody." In truth there is nothing simple about The Flower And The Vessel. The album's 11 songs span whispering textures, opaque moods, and surreal spoken word, leading the listener through a mirrored hall of beguiling mirages. Atkinson cites a trio of French classical compositions from her childhood as formative influences: Ravel's L'enfant Et Les Sortilèges, Debussy's La Mer, and Satie's Gymnopédies. There's certainly a shade of classicism woven within these tracks; melancholic piano motifs repeat then retreat into a radiant frost of shivering frequencies; processed voices recite cut-up poems and interviews over delay-refracted Rhodes and Wurlitzer; iPad gamelan patterns flutter from meditative to melancholic and back again, offset by pointillist patches of delicate software synesthesia. Much of Atkinson's discography is shaped by speech and the lyricism of language, but The Flower And The Vessel ventures further into silence. Field recordings from Tasmania and the Mojave Desert murmur beneath hushed reverberations of gong, vibraphone, and marimba, softly processed into an elegant emptiness, alternately eerie and serene. Her mode of minimalism has long been one of reduction, riddles, and curation, but here Atkinson's synergy feels close to apotheosis, emotive but ambivalent, a ceremony of expectation and invisible forces. The 19-minute closing collaboration with SUNN O))) guitarist Stephen O'Malley, "Des Pierres," is one of the album's few pieces tracked in a proper studio, but it broods and burns with the same subliminal majesty as the rest of The Flower And The Vessel: an ember in amber, seeds planted in shifting sands. Original artwork by Julien Carreyn, mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates and Mastering.