Statik

New Release "CYBER HILL" is Out!   
Album art by Teche Zemlya
Find the track in best quality here:
https://strukturator.bandcamp.com/album/cyber-hill

Cyber Hill

Automare_2017_04_Masters01

Order on Bandcamp

Papiro - Automare

Site-specific composition developed the acoustics of Silo City's Marine A grain elevator in Buffalo, NY. Composition by Lea Bertucci. Performed by Lea Bertucci, Steve Baczkowski, Bill Sacks and Kyle Ohlsen. This project was developed as part of Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center's Workspace Residency.

Terminus

Purchase: geographicnorth.bandcamp.com/album/catch-a-blessing
Catalog #: GN52
April 5, 2019
LP+DIGI

Matthew Sage is a composer, producer, label owner, and publisher based in Chicago, IL. Since his earliest recordings, Sage has carefully considered and crafted each of his various approaches to experimental music. His debut LP A Singular Continent was an endless epic that charted imaginative aural cartography and seemed to soundtrack actual worldbuilding. Now, after five years personal changes and growth, Sage returns with his tried and true sonic trademarks, but with a noticeably liberated approach to his brand of experimental studio music.

Catch a Blessing shows Sage in a much more impulsive light. Where past work existed in space that was cerebral, meditated, and composed, the music here is more natural, playful, and effort-less.

Opting for chance and the unknown rather than rules and conceptual rigor, Sage "practiced" an amorphous technique that led to profound moments of accidental, unplanned beauty. And the perks were plenty. As Sage explains: "Learning to know less and to just feel more about what I am making has become important to me. I like, or am learning to like, the possibility of that openness, that uncertainty. Not knowing. It is uncomfortable, but it is nourishing."

Recorded over a summer in a tiny room on the second floor of a 120-year-old apartment in Chicago, 'Catch a Blessing' is the result of and the meditation on the exquisite exhaust and lavish lushness of his crumbling (and rebuilt) locales. 

Presented as a collection of ornately expressionistic portraits of Chicago, Sage approached the album more as paintings or sculptures than musical compositions. Album opener "Avondale primer Gray" unfurls a calm but vibrant quasi-melody that dissolves into a blur of found sonic objects both familiar unknown. "Lions to Baffle" is a semi-synthetic symphony of muted, sax-laden alien jazz, while "Elevator Straffing" maintains a whirling, glittering hum of echoed dissonance. "Claiming Air Rights" could be the literal sound of a piano floating through space, levitating despite an impossible weight. "Michigan Turquoise" brings an exquisitely eerie hymn with the same ghastly grace of Sparklehorse. Album centerpiece "Window Unit +Three Flat" is an open-ended epic of texture and ambiguity, immediately followed by the warped and trickling elegance of "Polish Triangle". "Wolfe Point Fog" closes 'Catch a Blessing' with peculiar focus, departing with an open-ended and wholly optimistic focus.

The moods and modes are constantly, entirely at odds with themselves: private vs. public, abject vs. profound, rural vs. urban(e), and so on. Where other players of experimental studio music take a more high-minded, often stuffy approach, Catch a Blessing floats in airier, more refreshing modes. It’s endlessly lush but sincerely marked by decay. This is naturalism in the truest sense.

M. Sage - "Polish Triangle"

Dragon’s Eye Recordings is excited to welcome back Sublamp for his first full-length release on the label in nearly 10 years. Sublamp returns with 'Sister Maps'—a collection of parallel songs, parallel in time but separated by space. Inspired by a three-week tour of recording live episodes of 'Comedy Bang Bang' through 19 cities, Sublamp contemplates the impossibility of knowledge or understanding place when presented with only fleeting glimpses of it. Each track covers the same twelve minutes as if it had been captured simultaneously in six locations across an imaginary city. 

All the tracks on 'Sister Maps' influence each other in subtle ways. Sounds wander between or bleed through into the background, while other recordings maintain isolated independence. While listening to an album is generally a linear experience, Sublamp’s (accidental) choice to flow each song seamlessly into the next complicates the idea of placing works in parallel. The listening experience transforms, like moving through space while a möbius strip of the same twelve minutes repeats around you, or like meandering through an unfamiliar city with only your personal experience available to understand it. 

A city is not linear. A map shows only a space delineated, but not what occurs within that space. The borders of a city exist in both space and in time, which make it impossible to know a place completely. Wherever you are, there is always something happening somewhere else, simultaneously. An experience in parallel with your own.

Sister Maps

Sublamp - Map 01 (edit)

Taken from Vanessa Wagner's EP Inland Versions on InFiné, out September 27.

More: https://www.orbmag.com/music/premiere

@infine-music

Inland Versions

Orb Premieres

Premiere: Vanessa Wagner - Elf Dance (Suzanne Ciani Version) [Moondog]

Svitlana Nainio and Oleksandr Yurchenko are musicians with a long history in the still-mysterious Kiev Underground. Nainio’s first group Cukor Bima Smert [Sugar, The White Death] were active in the late 80s before Nainio’s solo record was released in 1992. Her work centers around deconstructed, minimal treatments of Ukrainian folk music and the palette of Eastern European harmony and rhythm. Oleksandr Yurchenko, a longtime collaborator and a pivotal figure in the Kiev music scene, was instrumental in creating the Novaya Scena, a loose conglomerate of artists who encouraged eachother to excavate both the sounds of the west and Ukrainian tradition.  'Znayesh Yak? Rozkazhi' ('Know How? Tell Me') is the duo’s most fully realised collaboration, an enchanting, complete world informed by Yurchenko’s instrumentation and playfulness with form and how it frames Nainio’s otherworldly soprano, recalling Liz Fraser steeped in contrapuntal melody and hymnal improvisation …. Originally released in 1996, this is the debut release of Znayesh Yak? Roxkazhi outside of Ukraine and a follow up to Lisova Kolekciya, re-issued by Skire in 2017.
Recorded in an abandoned park in Kiev during a fertile period for artists and musicians following the collapse of the Soviet Union, 'Znayesh Yak? Rozkazhi' sees Nianio and Yurchenko combine Casio keyboard, hammered dulcimer, percussion, and Nainio's unmistakeable soprano vocalisations to create music sympathetic to the specific locations in which they chose to record. Yurchenko's contribution is perhaps more present on this recording than anything else we have heard from the duo. His percussive dulcimer playing provides the basis on which Nianio can weave delicate keyboard lines while playfully contorting her voice, shifting from a low register reminiscent of Nico to what could be the call of a bird or an animal in distress. Whatever the intent, the effect is haunting and beautiful in equal measure. 

Nainio’s unique, unmistakeable vocal rings true here, weaving through the interlocking rhythmic patterns conjured by Yurchenko. There’s prevailing earthiness on the recordings, found in the warm hiss of the lo fi means of recording or the grinding, unspecified sounds that occasionally accompany the melody, like drones created on the fly by hands trying to keep warm in the ice. A prevailing mood of fragility and beauty seeps from these melodies, delicate moments of clarity spun by the two musicians. Znayesh Yak. Rozkazhi? is a dream spun in twilight, a crystalline, private world the listener feels both alien and welcome in.

A Freezing Dusk On The Empty Road

Nasoshnik