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viewing 1 To 21 of 21 items
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SOD 125LP
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Gyropedie, Anne Guthrie's third record for Students of Decay, takes us further into her hermetic practice, wherein expertly captured field recordings, French horn, and electronics are woven into potent and richly imagined electroacoustic environments. In Guthrie's own words, "Quite literally a record of pilgrimage from East to West. Remnants of Midwest and East Coast soundmarks, instruments sold to lighten the travel load, sketched out and then buried under the new. Winter birds and crunching snow, frozen playgrounds, broken synths -- I spent a year decoupaging over this, but of course it's still there. A second moon appears occasionally in the daytime, and there are frequent, murky transmissions. California has something alien about it I'm still trying to grasp. Primarily vintage, unabashed, corny, I find myself becoming an impressionist." Anne Guthrie is an acoustician, composer, and French horn player. She studied music composition and English at the University of Iowa and architectural acoustics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she completed her Ph.D in 2014. Her music combines her knowledge of acoustics and contemporary composition/improvisation. Her electronic music has focused on exploiting the natural acoustic phenomena of unique architectural spaces through minimal processing of field recordings. Her composition has focused on the orchestration of non-musical sounds, speech in particular. Her French horn playing has focused on electronic processing and extended techniques used in improvisatory settings, as a soloist and with Fraufraulein and Delicate Sen, among others. Her acoustics research has focused on the use of ambisonics for stage acoustics. Includes download code; edition of 300.
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SOD 124LP
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Mine is the Heron is the new Tom James Scott record, the first document of his solo work since 2017. Over the past decade, the UK-based composer has released a diverse body of recordings via labels such as Bo'Weavil, Carnivals, Where To Now?, and his own impeccably curated Skire imprint. This album finds Scott in half-remembered, sanguine moods, some of which are likely to remind listeners of his collaborative work with Andrew Chalk. Fragile acoustic piano runs are meted out with painterly finger strokes, buoyed by subtle, idiosyncratic FM sound design, chimes, and guitar. Culled from recordings composed and put to tape over the past several years, the collection has the feel of a poet's selected works, or perhaps more appropriately, a compendium of letters -- exquisite vignettes that feel simultaneously private and important to disseminate into world. The hermetic nature of this quietly stunning music is evocative of abandoned shingle beaches and misty marshes, and of the Virginia Woolf novel from which the album takes its title: "Mine is the heron that stretches its vast wings lazily; and the cow that creaks as it pushes one foot before another munching; and the wild, swooping swallow; and the faint red in the sky, and the green when the red fades; the silence and the bell; the call of the man fetching cart-horses from the fields -- all are mine." Recorded by Tom James Scott on Walney Island, 2016-2019. Mastered by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering.
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SOD 123LP
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"Beside Myself is the second full-length release from Canadian sound artist crys cole. Known to many through her extensive collaborative practice with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Leif Elggren, and James Rushford, in her solo work cole uses contact microphones, voice, simple electronics, and field recordings to create sonic environments that linger uneasily at the threshold of perception. Demonstrating how cole's work has developed and deepened since the relative austerity of her first solo LP Sand/Layna (BT 017LP, 2015), Beside Myself offers two lushly immersive side-long pieces that explore ideas of compositional drift. 'The Nonsuch' is inspired by the aural hallucinations experienced in the hypnagogic state during the onset of sleep. Opening with scratching contact mic textures and unintelligible vocal murmurs, the piece threads together live and studio performances with field recordings of urban environments to create a texture that is at once seemingly consistent and marked by constant transitions. Individual elements rise up from the background thrum only to disappear just as we become conscious of them; heterogenous sounds and spaces succeed one another with the unassailable logic of dreams. 'In Praise of Blandness (Chapter IX)' also focuses on drift and transition, but in a much more single-minded way. Over a rich, slowly-evolving organ drone, cole reads a passage from the French sinologist François Julien's book In Praise of Blandness (1991) exploring the concept of 'blandness' in the Taoist aesthetics of sound. Beginning crisp and clear, cole's voice becomes gradually less distinct over the course of the piece, the spoken words blurred by resonant frequencies à la Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room until we are left with only the rhythm of incomprehensible speech. The text that cole reads acts a perfect description of her aesthetic project: 'We hear it still, but just barely, and as it diminishes it makes all the more audible that soundless beyond into which it is about to extinguish itself. We are listening then, to its extinction, to its return to that great undifferentiated matrix'." --Francis Plagne (November, 2019) Includes download code; edition of 300.
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SOD 122LP
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Patience is the debut full-length album by Sante Fe-based artist Theodore Cale Schafer. Alternately murky and narcoleptic and bristling with grit and light, this collection of eight pieces is a delicate play of contrasts. Impressionistic settings unfurl with an unhurried gait, opening with the dream-like disorientation of "Gold Chain" in which a degraded location recording gives way to a soft web of treated piano motifs. Schafer's compositions are sumptuous yet unfussy, recalling perhaps the concise, vignette-oriented tape works of Andrew Chalk, which seem to prioritize spontaneity and ephemerality over preciousness and decorum. This approach yields substantive results, as on "It's Late", which marries a dolorous, clanging guitar sketch to the sound of change jostling in the pocket of a walker and the laughter of friends or passersby. This is diaristic music -- rough-hewn, confessional, and teeming with possibility. Theodore Cale Schafer has released on Amethyst Sunset and Summer Isle. Artwork by Andrea Bjurström. Mastered by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering. Includes download code; First edition of 300.
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SOD 121LP
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Continental is the new full-length solo record by Milan-based multi-instrumentalist Nicola Ratti, following recent releases on Where to Now? and Room40. Conceived of by Ratti as a "series of big rooms or places to get lost in, full of small details and characterized each by a single flavor or perfume," it is a surprising and vibrant collection of music. Working with a palette of spare, expertly deployed percussive synthesis techniques, Ratti's work here is both labyrinthine and concise. These eight tracks are able to evoke spaces real and imagined with startling efficiency and clarity. Sprawling old world libraries, cliff caves inhabited by dripping water and rock doves, an automaton nearly slipping its axis but recovering just in time and finding a new sense of purpose in the process. Ratti forms the duo Bellows with Giuseppe Ielasi. "Cuarto" features Dale Cornish. Includes download code; first edition of 300.
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SOD 120LP
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Blue Chemise documents the hermetic sound world of Australia's Mark Gomes. Daughters Of Time follows 2017's brilliant full-length Influence On Dusk, released in micro-edition on Gomes's own Greedy Ventilator imprint. It is an elegiac set of vignettes recorded straight to dictaphone with minimal post-production. These pieces function in a manner akin to Loren Connor's evocative "airs", conjuring poignant, intangible senses of longing and nostalgia then disappearing well before overstaying their welcome. Regarding their genesis, Gomes points to a quote from Australian artist Robert Hunter: "It's like I'm external to them. They develop their own assertion and character; their becoming finished is a thing they decide themselves. It's unexplainable."
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SOD 119LP
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Snapshots of an abandoned city. Fragments of song drifting out of basements and across alleyways, muffled conversations. Scrutinized, the "music" disappears -- maybe paracusia? Brass Orchids, Anne Guthrie's second full-length album for Students of Decay, is an entrancing collage of new and old sounds drawn from a variety of beguiling sources. Posthumous contributions from the artist's grandfather, a jazz pianist; obsolete media palimpsests (some vanity, some necessity); tap dancing on a peeling floor... An unsettling and strangely beautiful album -- akin to something on the tip of your tongue, which, before you can name it, slips away into forgetting. Includes download code; Edition of 300.
Anne Guthrie is an acoustician, composer, and French horn player living in Brooklyn, New York. She studied Music Composition and English at the University of Iowa and Architectural Acoustics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she completed her Ph.D in 2014. Her music combines her knowledge of acoustics and contemporary composition/improvisation. Her electronic music has focused on exploiting the natural acoustic phenomena of unique architectural spaces through minimal processing of field recordings. Her composition has focused on the orchestration of non-musical sounds, speech in particular. Her French horn playing has focused on electronic processing and extended techniques used in improvisatory settings, as a soloist and with Fraufraulein and Delicate Sen, among others. Her acoustics research has focused on the use of ambisonics for stage acoustics.
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SOD 116LP
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Recorded in early 2015 and originally released as a micro edition cassette on World News Records, No Language is the debut collection of songs by Melbourne's Caroline No. The group's unique, beguiling sound sits somewhere between archetypal Dunedin pop and languorous, textural improvisation. No Language was spontaneously recorded with one microphone and the serendipity of the session proves tactile in the listening experience. Heavily reverbed laughter, coughing, fits, and starts with various processing equipment contribute wonderfully to the ephemeral nature of the music. On "Up To Downtown", vocalist Caroline Kennedy implores the band to "just try to stay in time" before lurching into what, against all odds, turns out to be a remarkably anthemic earworm of a pop song. The closer, "Roomer", incorporates granular processing (perhaps a pedal someone forgot they'd brought to the session) to endearing and startling effect. Ultimately, No Language is a marvelous balancing act of a record, drawing from pop, free improv, and psychedelia in equal parts to arrive at something timeless. Students of Decay is a record label based out of Cincinnati, Ohio, run by Alex Cobb. Active since 2005, the label has published a wide range of ambient, drone, micro-sound, and electronic recordings, on a variety of formats. Includes download code; Edition of 300.
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SOD 114LP
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"Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist Billy Gomberg's past work has released by labels such as and/OAR, Digitalis and Sunshine Ltd. In addition to his solo output, he operates in a variety of collaborative settings (including Fraufraulein, a duo with fellow label alum Anne Guthrie) and, over the course of the last five years, has carved out a niche for himself at the crossroads of electro-acoustic improvisation, ambient, and minimalist music. The beguiling Slight At That Contact brings to mind both the bucolic electronica of Microstoria and the expansive arrangements of Mirages-era Tim Hecker. 'Medial' opens the record with a sea of vaporous, blooming tones set against an array of delicately percussive clicks and cuts. 'Acute' further develops this, conjuring the cinematic atmosphere of a train station in a ruined, futuristic metropolis. Over the course of eight understated but nuanced compositions, Gomberg cultivates an intoxicating aural topography, a deep, expressive collection that offers considerable rewards to the attentive listener."
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SOD 112LP
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"City of Brides is the third full-length album by En, the Bay Area-based duo of multi-instrumentalists Maxwell August Croy and James Devane. It was recorded over the last few years in a variety of contexts and follows upon 2012's well-received Already Gone, further developing the diverse palette of that record. Across four sides, the pair presents exotic, transportive and richly detailed pieces that toe the line between ecstatic, long-form ambience and elegant, structured electronic composition. As always, Croy's koto is a focal point, its distinctive tone ringing out amidst the hazy guitar, vocal and synthesis environments that surround it. The material ranges from moody to celestial, from cool to white hot. Pieces such as 'Blonde Is Back' and 'Mendocino Nature Rave' merge sizzling modular synth lacework with plaintive, familiar drone clouds to rapturous ends, while the two-part 'Songs for Diminished Lovemaking' sequence charts a more minimal and nostalgic course. Students of Decay is pleased to present En's most realized and defining statement to date, a welcome addition to the ever-expanding and fertile topography of American West Coast drone music."
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SOD 113LP
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"The trajectory of Alex Cobb's music over the course of the last decade could be viewed as a distillation of tone and atmosphere to arrive at Chantepleure, his most optimistic and sanguine musical statement to date. The album, however, was created at a time of heartache, isolation, and emotional upheaval and acts as a balm of tender tones where abstract guitar lines circle and suspend in a kind of refined elegance. Noise, once a hallmark of Cobb's music, has not been entirely removed, but manifests here in a different form. A delicate dissonance shades the edges of these four tracks, providing textural color and gorgeously offsetting the lush nature of the music. Even in short spans, this approach yields substantial results. At three and a half minutes, 'Disporting with a Shadow' pulls back the curtain just enough to let flecks of natural guitar notes and traces of alluring melody seep into the mix. The album closes with the side-long 'Path of Appearance,' a cathartic composition that is best described as a poem of overtones which, like the rest of the album, is sourced from electric guitar and minimal effects but feels more akin to the sun stretching to fill all corners of a darkened room. A testament to sonic refinement, a way of coping, an exciting step forward for an established artist -- the minimalist Chantepleure is all of these things."
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SOD 103LP
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2014 release. "Based in Brooklyn, Anne Guthrie is a professional acoustician, composer and sound artist whose work combines a highly technical knowledge of natural reverb, field recording and extended microphone techniques with live and processed instrumentation, including French horn, violoncello and contrabass. Her music explores the play of dichotomies: cacophony / beauty, accidental / intentional, unhinged / refined, traditional / outsider. Codiaeum Variegatum is Guthrie's debut full-length proper, following out-of-print short-run releases on labels such as Engraved Glass and Copy For Your Records, as well as the recently released and critically lauded Sinter, a collaboration with Richard Kamerman issued by Erstwhile Records' sub-label ErstAEU. The album's six compositions showcase Guthrie's acumen as a composer of rich and diverse sonic phenomena. From the keeling strings which open 'Branching Low and Spreading,' she guides the listener through dense yet highly structured thickets of sound, juxtaposing astute room / field recordings with classical instrumentation, both dry and processed. On 'Unlike More Slender and Graceful,' filtered French horn plumes are wed to cavernous, watery field recordings to forge beautiful yet bleak vistas, motifs to be revisited in a more hopeful light later on. Ultimately, Guthrie's work occupies a heady middle ground somewhere between the enchantment of the everyday manifested by artists such as Graham Lambkin and Vanessa Rossetto and the high-minded electroacoustic investigations of her fellow Erstwhile alumni."
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SOD 098LP
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"The first full-length Alex Cobb has released since Taiga Remains' well-received Wax Canopy (Digitalis, 2009). Sonically however, the two records could not be more dissimilar, with Passage to Morning recalling more the meditative guitar minimalism of Ribbons of Dust, his prior release for the Root Strata label. Here, glacially moving, eternally receding drones sourced from strings, tape loops and analog synthesizer are the order of the day, expertly arranged into succinct and imminently listenable compositions. Comparisons made of Cobb's previous recordings to Andrew Chalk and Christoph Heemann's work as Mirror prove particularly apt here, as Passage to Morning trades in the same sort of devotional, faraway sound design for which the pair have been justly praised. 'The Immediate Past' opens the record, with billowing, lulling tones hanging thick in the air like a struck bell frozen in time. Later, 'Bewildered By Its Blue' juxtaposes deep, brooding low-end tones with crackling tape noise and truly hypnotic cycles of analog synthesizer. That this is Cobb's first full-length under his own name is no coincidence, as here he offers us his most intimate recordings to date."
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SOD 097CD
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"It's been a little while since we've last heard from Oakland-based sound artist Marielle Jakobsons in a solo capacity, but that's certainly not to say she hasn't been busy. Last year saw full-length outings by her two duo projects, Date Palms and Myrmyr, and already in 2012 works with Bay Area drone ensemble Portraits and trio recordings with Helena Espvall and Agnes Szelag have been released. Her last major solo outing (under the nom-de-plume Darwinsbitch) came in form of the dark, complex Ore, released by Digitalis in 2009. With Glass Canyon, Jakobsons presents her first major work under her own name, a decision which perhaps offers a bit of insight into her compositional intentions on the album itself. Jakobsons sought to strip down her creative process to primarily just synthesizer and violin as a way of focusing, as she puts it, 'on where two timbres meet.' Meticulously composed from 2009-2011, Glass Canyon is a work of deep richness and beauty. Throughout the record, whirring, pulsing synths flutter around elegiac arcs of bowed strings. The effect of these juxtapositions is staggering, as evidenced to profound effect by the glacial opener 'Purple Sands'. Jakobsons' preternatural abilities as a sound designer allow the otherworldly tones culled from her synthesizers to be wed perfectly to the radiant sonorities of her violin. The results are compositions that are at once classical yet somehow alien, intimate yet estranged, as though we've stumbled upon a conservatory located entirely elsewhere, untethered to the terrestrial."
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SOD 097LP
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LP version with download code.
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SOD 096CD
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"Already Gone is the second full length album from West Coast dream-drone unit En, the duo of Maxwell August Croy and James Devane, following their well-received debut album The Absent Coast (released in 2010 on Root Strata, which Croy runs alongside Jefre Cantu-Ledesma). For their sophomore release, the pair has opened up their tonal palette considerably. While the comparisons that critics made of their first album to the work of Tim Hecker and Stars of the Lid still hold true, Already Gone finds Croy and Devane mining even richer sonic climes. Here, the duo pull back the curtain on some of their source material, a move that allows the diversity of their instrumentation to resonate. On The Sea Saw Swell, Croy's acoustic koto pings across the stereo spectrum as a looping guitar figure from Devane evaporates from the haze of a beautiful, slowly shifting drone. The side-long closer Elysia is likely the duo's defining recording to date, an epic slow-burner that reaches heights both angelic and cacophonous. Ultimately, it is the harmonious marriage of the organic and the obscured that recurs throughout the album that proves its defining trait, and it is precisely what makes En stand out in the ever-growing field of contemporary drone/ambient music."
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SOD 096LP
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SOD 090LP
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"In Search of Light is the full-length follow-up to the well-received Fountain (RS 057CD), Danny Paul Grody's debut solo release. Many listeners no doubt recognize Grody from his work in San Francisco-based groups Tarentel and The Drift. As a solo artist, he produces wistful, poignant music culled principally from acoustic guitar and synthesizer. Grody's work recalls aspects of the post-Takoma school in that fingerpicked, cyclical melodies make up the crux of many of his recordings. However, he also masterfully avoids the pitfalls of the genre, invariably favoring concision, lyricism and ideas over dexterity and flare. In listening to In Search of Light, one can't help but imagine these recordings appearing on some lost private issue California folk LP from the late '70s- such is the timelessness of Grody's aesthetic. As an album, In Search of Light is an assured and beautiful statement, an aural tracking shot of the California coast that feels as old and familiar as the sun. Artwork by Billy Joe Miller. Mastered by James Plotkin. LP in edition of 500."
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SOD 089LP
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"Describing the music of Aquarelle's Ryan Potts is a difficult task indeed. It's related to the hazy, heavily treated output of musicians such as Fennesz and Tim Hecker, but one would be remiss to locate it solely within the realm of electronic ambient or drone, as there are often strong organic, rhythmic and composerly elements to Potts' work. In fact, the title of his last record, Slow Circles, might offer the best point of access into the Aquarelle aesthetic, in which compositional tropes such as cyclicality and accretion are woven together with surging, bright overtones, fragmented acoustic guitar melodies, and monumental distortion. Another point of distinction between Potts' guitar-based compositions and that of the laptop-wielding contemporaries and forebears amongst whom one would be tempted to locate his sound is the fact that he largely eschews digital, 'in-the-box' processing. A self proclaimed 'FX pedal fetishist,' his compositions carry with them a boldness, depth and grit that is all but impossible to cultivate through DSP alone and aligns some elements of his sound with that of Scott Cortez/Lovesliescrushing and late-period Yellow Swans. Using a palette of electric and acoustic guitars, vintage and boutique effects pedals and various percussion sources, Potts crafts highly detailed, slowly evolving soundscapes which beg for repeat listens so that one might get inside their myriad layers. 'With Verticals' opens the record, blooming suddenly into a startlingly propulsive edifice replete with crackling, distorted guitar sounds married to quasi-Reichian percussion. Later, 'Origin' sizzles and hisses its way into a staggeringly detailed drone opus before opening up into a veritable vista of acoustic guitar, cymbal and cello histrionics. A cohesive and fully immersive collection, Sung in Broken Symmetry is an assured statement from a young musician who is equally comfortable navigating frailty and violence. Mastered by James Plotkin. Edition of 300."
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SOD 086LP
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"Recorded from 2009-2011, during which time Caboladies members Eric Lanham and Chris Bush relocated from Kentucky to Chicago, Renewable Destination constitutes the duo's most refined and focused work to date. Both as a collaborative unit and under solo monikers Carl Calm and Flower Man, Lanham and Bush have produced a wealth of limited-run releases in recent years on labels such as Arbor, Dekorder, Digitalis, and their own Smooth Tapes imprint which document their uniquely fractured sonic sensibilities. Perhaps what amazes most about the pair's work is the sheer diversity of their palettes. At any given time, we get the sense that any sound is possible, as they construct intricately-designed edifices rife with microcosmic detail. It is this keen attention to the hyper-detailed that distinguishes Renewable Destination, and the oeuvres of Lanham and Bush as a whole, from their 'synth revivalist' contemporaries.This is music that refuses to sit still, yet at the same proves remarkably coherent and, at times, strikingly beautiful. If pressed, one could perhaps locate the duo's aesthetic somewhere between the sounds of Mouse on Mars and Microstoria and composers such as Francois Bayle and Bernard Parmegiani, but the soundworlds which Lanham and Bush inhabit are truly and uniquely their own. Edition of 300 LPs w/ digital download coupons."
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SOD 085LP
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"With the release of 2010's Love is a Stream, the solo work of Bay Area stalwart Jefre Cantu-Ledesma (The Alps/Tarentel/Root Strata) leapt into public consciousness, garnishing accolades for its transfixing melding of shoegaze pop with drone, ambient and noise sensibilities. Originally released in 2007 as part of our limited run CDR series, Shining Skull Breath finds Cantu mining similarly rich sonic territory with enchanting results. Throughout the album he submerges delicate, drifting guitar passages in constantly shifting webs of sound, creating buried melodies which snake and hover through a haze of tape noise. If the emphasis in Love is a Stream was on the subtle subversion and appropriation of shoegaze tropes, on Shining Skull Breath Cantu's compositions seem a bit more opaque and mysterious, but no less moving. He invites the listener to accompany him through this beautiful fog and, in the process, offers a glimpse of rare and radiant beauty. This definitive edition has been remastered by James Plotkin and features two new tracks not included on the original release."
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