Smoothest transition i've ever felt on my ears 

Spencer Zahn:
Instagram: instagram.com/spencerzahn/
Facebook: facebook.com/spencerzahn/
Twitter: twitter.com/spencerzahn
Spotify: bit.ly/spencerzahn-spotify
Apple Music: bit.ly/spencerzahn-apple

Spencer Zahn - Sadly, Slowly

Canto Ostinato is the new volume of classical minimalism from musician and producer Erik Hall. Written for four pianos in 1979 by Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt, the piece is freshly framed as an intimate, hour-long solo performance consisting of multitracked grand pianos, electric piano, and organ. Modern yet warm, ethereal yet tangible, Hall’s Canto Ostinato expertly bridges a revered piece of meditative concert repertoire with a tactile and highly personal studio setting.

Chicago-born and Michigan-based, Erik Hall is known as a multi-instrumental pillar for the groups NOMO, Wild Belle, and his own songwriting moniker In Tall Buildings. He has composed music for feature films, and as a producer/engineer he has shaped records for Natalie Bergman and Western Vinyl labelmates Lean Year. In a 2020 creative pivot, he chose to reinvent composer Steve Reich’s monumental contemporary classical masterpiece Music for 18 Musicians as a solo undertaking, applying the piece’s score to the familiar keyboards, guitars, and synthesizers in his studio. “At the time I think I was working through my identity as a musician and an artist,” Hall explains, “and on a level there was some sort of exorcism of a long held pop spirit.” The album was celebrated for being “freshly thrilling” and “legible in history but assertive of the moment” (Pitchfork) and “beguiling, meditational, and magical” (Electronic Sound). It won the 2021 Libera Award for Best Classical Record, and it quickly joined the canon of the piece’s quintessential recordings.

“There is a pseudo-meditational benefit to working on a longform piece that’s built on repetition,” Hall says. “Every stage— from internalizing the music, to executing the performance, to editing and mixing the record— requires deep and sustained presence of mind. I’ve always been drawn to a hallucinatory combination of harmony and repetition, and I found the entire process addictive.”

An apt second chapter, Canto Ostinato is inherently vast, and its score gives great creative license to the performer. Comprising 106 sections, complete freedom is given to repeat each one as many or as few times as desired. Additional leeway is given with regard to dynamics, articulation, and even instrumentation. On the heels of his previous, rather maximal arrangement, Hall chose to limit this album’s palette to three foundational keyboards of his studio: a 1962 Hammond M-101 organ, a 1978 Rhodes Mark I electric piano, and his family-heirloom 1910 Steinway grand piano. “This particular piece brought the added challenge of rekindling my dexterity as a pianist, something I haven’t maintained in earnest since I was a teenager,” he admits. The ensuing five-note rhythmic motif— the piece’s primary building block— is steady and workmanlike, forgoing virtuosic flare for depth, texture, and resonance, and eventually giving way to the stunning gratification of a gorgeously lyrical left turn.

As with Music for 18 Musicians, Hall employed no loops nor quantization nor any programmed or sequenced instruments of any kind. Every part was performed live in a room and captured with microphones, one at a time, each informed by, and reacting to the last. In this way the record breathes with interplay and an organic humanity, complete with flaws, noise, and the faint sound of turning pages. The recording quality is nonetheless toneful and saturated, characteristic of Hall’s production style and straying from the usual transparency of classical albums by using gear with tubes, transformers, and various stages of compression in the signal path. Always there is unmistakable realism and the feeling of being present in the room, sitting among the keys, hammers, and tines.

Ten Holt said: “Time, patience and discipline are the prerequisites for making a genetic code productive." His landmark composition provides Hall once again with a wondrous space in which to reverently embody this sentiment and deftly convey the elegant beauty of this music.

Erik Hall - "Canto Ostinato - Sections 17 - 30"

In the game this plays in, you slice up food, and it kind of reminded me of Fruit Ninja, which gives me Asian vibes. So I meshed this with my own style and some synthwave. And it sounds so beautiful.🥹

Prototype Games

Comet Blare

Substrata 2

Poa Alpina

Taken from 'Horizon' by Christopher Willits, out May 19, 2017.

Order Links:
The Ghostly Store: https://goo.gl/iD00zE
Retailer of your choice: https://Ghostly.lnk.to/horizon

Horizon

Christopher Willits - Comet

Taken from Hannah's new album: 'Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia' 
OUT Sept 22nd 2017
http://smarturl.it/syjioe

**** MOJO / **** Record Collector / **** Loud & Quiet

PRE-ORDER 
Limited Edition Metallic Space Vinyl and CD: hannahpeel.tmstor.es
Itunes: itunes.apple.com/gb/album/mary-ca…eia/id1252718712

Hannah Peel's third album is a seven-movement odyssey composed for analogue synthesizers and full, traditional 29 piece colliery brass band!

 "We have a hundred billion neurons in our brains, as many as there are stars in a galaxy" Theoretical physicist and author, Carlo Rovelli.

LIVE DATES:

29th July - WOMAD Festival
5th August - Edinburgh Festival
23rd Sept - Liverpool - Liverpool Philharmonic
30th Sept - Stockton - The Arc
21st Oct - Barnsley - The Civic Theatre
28th Oct - Basingstoke, The Anvil Concert Hall
MORE TO BE ANNOUNCED...

INFO:
With only a year following on from the release of her second album ‘Awake But Always Dreaming’ to widespread acclaim (Voted No.1 Album Of the Year – Electronic Sound Magazine), ‘Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia’, explores one person's journey to outer space, by recounting the story of an unknown, elderly, pioneering, electronic musical stargazer and her lifelong dream to leave her terraced home in the mining town of Barnsley, South Yorkshire, to see Cassiopeia for herself. With artwork by Grammy award winning designer Jonathan Barnbrook (David Bowie collaborator on albums ‘Blackstar’ and ‘The Next Day’ ) and the complete brass band and rhythm section recorded live on location in The Barnsley Civic Theatre with Peter Gabriel’s Real World studio team, this exclusive album combines Peel’s detailed, analogue synth layered production and her expressive flair for performance with ‘Tubular Brass’, featuring the top UK championship brass band players. It’s a wholly unique, collaborative sound and seemingly, a first of it’s kind both live and on record. 

At the close of the album’s final song ‘The Planet of Passed Souls’, tutti brass jostle with the hiss and crackle of a 78rpm record. An emotionally charged, scratchy sample taken from a 1928 recording of Peel’s own choirboy grandfather in Manchester Cathedral leaves the listener questioning the reality of Mary’s connection with the stars… Did she ever make it to Cassiopeia? Is this all a daydream as she sits in a back garden shed tinkering with electronics and her telescope? Or maybe this is her final breath as her mind and body pass into another realm of life? Is this science or fantasy? And how much is there really a division between the two? 

ALBUM TRACKS:
1. Goodbye Earth
2. Sunrise Through The Dusty Nebula 
3. Deep Space Cluster 
4. Andromeda M31
5. Life Is On The Horizon 
6. Archid Orange Dwarf
7. The Planet Of Passed Souls

Mary Casio - Journey to Cassiopeia

Hannah Peel - 'Sunrise Through The Dusty Nebula'

Taken from Hannah's new album: 'Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia' 
OUT Sept 22nd 2017
**** MOJO / **** Record Collector / **** Loud & Quiet

PRE-ORDER 
Limited Edition Metallic Space Vinyl / CD / Digital: http://smarturl.it/syjioe

Hannah Peel's third album is a seven-movement odyssey composed for analogue synthesizers and full, traditional 29 piece colliery brass band!

 "We have a hundred billion neurons in our brains, as many as there are stars in a galaxy" Theoretical physicist and author, Carlo Rovelli.

LIVE DATES:
Tickets: http://www.hannahpeel.com/projects 
23rd Sept - Liverpool - Liverpool Philharmonic
30th Sept - Stockton - The Arc
21st Oct - Barnsley - The Civic Theatre
28th Oct - Basingstoke, The Anvil Concert Hall
MORE TO BE ANNOUNCED...

INFO:
With only a year following on from the release of her second album ‘Awake But Always Dreaming’ to widespread acclaim (Voted No.1 Album Of the Year – Electronic Sound Magazine), ‘Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia’, explores one person's journey to outer space, by recounting the story of an unknown, elderly, pioneering, electronic musical stargazer and her lifelong dream to leave her terraced home in the mining town of Barnsley, South Yorkshire, to see Cassiopeia for herself. With artwork by Grammy award winning designer Jonathan Barnbrook (David Bowie collaborator on albums ‘Blackstar’ and ‘The Next Day’ ) and the complete brass band and rhythm section recorded live on location in The Barnsley Civic Theatre with Peter Gabriel’s Real World studio team, this exclusive album combines Peel’s detailed, analogue synth layered production and her expressive flair for performance with ‘Tubular Brass’, featuring the top UK championship brass band players. It’s a wholly unique, collaborative sound and seemingly, a first of it’s kind both live and on record. 

At the close of the album’s final song ‘The Planet of Passed Souls’, tutti brass jostle with the hiss and crackle of a 78rpm record. An emotionally charged, scratchy sample taken from a 1928 recording of Peel’s own choirboy grandfather in Manchester Cathedral leaves the listener questioning the reality of Mary’s connection with the stars… Did she ever make it to Cassiopeia? Is this all a daydream as she sits in a back garden shed tinkering with electronics and her telescope? Or maybe this is her final breath as her mind and body pass into another realm of life? Is this science or fantasy? And how much is there really a division between the two? 

ALBUM TRACKS:
1. Goodbye Earth
2. Sunrise Through The Dusty Nebula 
3. Deep Space Cluster 
4. Andromeda M31
5. Life Is On The Horizon 
6. Archid Orange Dwarf
7. The Planet Of Passed Souls

Hannah Peel - 'Archid Orange Dwarf'

Hannah Peel

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