Track 3 from No Lands' debut album, NEGATIVE SPACE, coming July 29, 2014 on digital, CD, 12" vinyl, and limited-edition clear vinyl

PRE-ORDER HERE: nolands.bandcamp.com/

www.nolands.org
www.newamrecords.com/negative-space

Negative Space is the debut full-length LP from No Lands, the recording project of Brooklyn-based electronic musician and sound artist Michael Hammond.

As a sound designer, producer, and programmer, Hammond has fostered a lifelong obsession with sound. Growing up in West Tennessee in the 90s, Hammond first began his recording experiments on the family desktop computer, printing his sprawling opuses on CD-Rs and pushing the limits of primitive processors.

Later, Hammond spent time creating custom music software and soldering together speakers in a search for new sounds. Studying with visionary composer and instrument builder Dan Trueman, Hammond further honed his technical craft. On Negative Space, some of these tools are employed, along with an arsenal of guitars, vintage synthesizers, drum machines, and processed vocals to create pristine and enveloping sound worlds.

Written and recorded over the course of 3 years, the album is an atlas of the sounds that have preoccupied Hammond. While the majority of the instruments were performed by Hammond, the album features cameos from Anthony LaMarca (current touring member of The War on Drugs and previously a member of St. Vincent), Aaron Roche (who performs regularly with R. Stevie Moore and Chris Schlarb), and Jay Hammond.

When performing live, Hammond is joined by these musicians. The four-piece becomes a digital hive mind of wires and devices, with each individual's vocals and instruments filtered through the central brain of Hammond's computer.

In visual art, the concept of negative space refers to the areas around and between the subject of a work of art. The auditory equivalent of negative space is not immediately apparent. Is it silence (as John Cage might conceive of it)? Or maybe noise? On Negative Space, No Lands plumbs the depths of these questions with a patience and intensity that is rare. Ultimately, the album is a document of this obsessive relationship with both sound and song, the genesis of which spans the course of three years and a hurricane.

Negative Space consists of 9 sonic environments that range from ambient soundscapes to sprawling song structures. The album drifts from one environment to the next as if navigating a dream state. Swirling digital textures give way momentarily to tightly arranged songs. Some tracks are cut off abruptly and swallowed whole (see the end of “Pretender” or “City”) while others transfix the listener into a deep hypnosis (“Sleep Atlas”).

Much of the music for Negative Space was written and recorded following a period of itinerancy in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. The flood swept through Hammond’s apartment and studio space in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn and leaked a particular feeling of unease and rootlessness into his music. The watery world that displaced him became a renewed object of fascination, kindling a nascent obsession with all things aquatic.

Visions of vast bodies of water and civilization lost pervade the album: on “Seawall,” Hammond sings: "Sea flowing westward, reveal the streets of gold." At the same time, the name No Lands itself suggests both a warning and a fantasy, a liminal state where blissful glitch sets the stage for a synthesizer melody desperately gasping for its final breath (“Icefisher”). The No Lands sound is born of the clash between the creative and destructive qualities of water, where the difference between the displacement of a flood and the zeal of an afternoon swim is never quite clear.

Negative Space was mixed by Alexander Overington and mastered by Joe Lambert. In addition to digital and CD, the album will be available on 12" vinyl, including a limited edition run of clear vinyl.

Pretender

from https://nolands.bandcamp.com/album/negative-space

Outside Of You

No Lands remix of Caroline Shaw's Partita for 8 Voices, performed by Roomful of Teeth.

Originally premiered by Q2 Music.

nolands.org

Allemande (No Lands Remix)

Remix by No Lands.

Original recording by yMusic:  https://ymusicensemble.bandcamp.com/track/bladed-stance-marcos-balter

"When I first heard Marcos Balter's composition Bladed Stance, I was struck by what seemed like a simple and subtly beautiful piece (simple in terms of effect, if not necessarily construction or execution). Upon further research (i.e. a Google search), I realized the title Bladed Stance actually comes from a way of standing used frequently by police officers when confronting suspected criminals. After learning this I began to detect an undercurrent of conflict lurking beneath the shimmering surface of the piece. Whether or not this was the composer's intention, I don't know, but I was working on the remix while following the recent news of the grand jury decisions in Missouri and here in New York, so conflict was certainly on my mind.  For my remix I decided to bring these things I was hearing in the background of the piece to the foreground, distorting some of the instruments beyond recognition and splicing in some found sound from a police training academy." - MH

Bladed Stance (yMusic) - No Lands Remix

Written for CT-SWaM Contemporary Temporary - Sound Works and Music

8 Channel Audio

For Percussion, Hardware, and Software

(This is a stereo mix)

Uses RotaryX – a custom software device for multi-channel mixing on the fly.

Banality Shreds – 8 Channel

New track from forthcoming collaborative album by Deerhoof and Dal Niente.  Pre-order and read more here:  https://dalnientedeerhoof.bandcamp.com/

Coming April 29, 2016 on New Amsterdam Records.

Movement 6 from meltDown Upshot, composed by Marcos Balter.

Press inquiries:  jill@newamrecords.com

New Amsterdam Records is excited to announce the new collaborative album from Deerhoof ("the best band in the world” - Pitchfork) and Chicago-based 22-piece contemporary music group Dal Niente (“a model of what contemporary music needs" - The Chicago Tribune), Balter / Saunier, which will be released on April 29. The album features works by Brazilian-born composer Marcos Balter and arrangements by Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier of his band’s songs. The album will be celebrated at ensemble Dal Niente’s 10th Anniversary Party in Chicago on April 30 at Dal Niente's Studio & 3rd Floor Commons at 4045 N Rockwell, which will include the Chicago premiere of Saunier’s piece on the album, “Deerhoof Chamber Variations.” 

Deerhoof and Dal Niente first crossed paths in 2012 when they shared a bill at Chicago’s Millennium Park. The two groups bonded instantly over their shared sensibilities and began a long-term collaboration, performing together when possible and inspiring each other along the way. Balter / Saunier is a culmination of these explorations, an intricate intermingling of styles that captures each group at its most adventurous and encapsulates what it means to create, perform and listen to music in 2016. 

Despite the scope and scale of the collaboration (with more than 30 people involved), the recording process was a remarkably DIY effort. Balter / Saunier is self-produced, mixed and edited; composers session-produced their pieces; and engineer Dan Nichols cleverly turned a busy downtown ballroom into a treated recording environment. Everyone spent a lot of time listening – to the music and each other – and it shows: the final product is the very definition of a meeting of the minds, a perfect distillation of several (highly developed) artistic voices. 

Balter / Saunier consists of two longer works, one each by Balter and Saunier, with one shorter piece by Balter between the two. The album opens with Balter’s seven-part piece “meltDown Upshot”, a magnetic mix of heady beats, catchy pop, absorbing postminimalism, angular melodies and fireworks of free jazz written specifically for the two groups’ collaboration. Next is “Pois que nada que dure, ou que durando,” a poem by Fernando Pessoa that translates to "For that nothing lasts, or that lasting” in English, a dissonance-tinged work that plays like a sonic realization of Dalí’s “Persistence of Memory.” The album closes with Saunier's “Deerhoof Chamber Variations”, a work for Dal Niente that uses Deerhoof's catalogue as source material. Rather than simply re-arranging Deerhoof songs by rote, Saunier flexes his compositional background to create a meditation on the group’s discography. Familiar melodies – set amongst grand, expansive arrangements – drift in and out of view as if from a refracted memory.

Dal Niente & Deerhoof - meltDown Upshot: 6. Cherubim (Marcos Balter)

Singer-songwriter Anthony LaMarca worked with his brother to bring us a beautifully thoughtful song in response to suffering and Revelation 21:5 for Spark and Echo Arts' Bible Illumination Project.

FROM THE ARTIST: 

This song is based on Revelation 21:5. This past August I found out I had multiple myeloma. It was a big shock and ultimately resulted in my having to have a bone marrow transplant in January. Before I went into the hospital my sister-in-law and her kids made me this painting that had that verse written on it. For the two weeks I was in the hospital that painting was something I could return to and find peace and reassurance. I was scared and uncomfortable. I missed being home. I missed cooking. But I knew that that verse was true. My body was being renewed. Learning to trust and face fear head-on is not easy. It’s hard to give up control, but it is also freeing to realize when you are in a situation that is out of your control. So, this song aims to illustrate a change from fear to reassurance and peace.

ARTIST BIO:

Anthony LaMarca is a musician from Youngstown, Ohio. He currently plays in The War On Drugs, sometimes with Dean & Britta, and previously with St. Vincent. He and his brother, Angelo, make records as The Building. He also has a wonderful German Shepherd named Petra.

All Things New

All Things New - Anthony LaMarca

tracklist: http://www.thefader.com/2016/08/23/dj-rupture-book-nrg-mix

my new book!! http://uprootbook.com

BOOK NRG MIX

From the new EP Without Chasms, released today exclusively through the New Amsterdam Records Bandcamp Subscription.  Subscribe and get the album here:  https://newamsterdamrecords.bandcamp.com/subscribe

The project features music by Brittelle and video/art by deep web artist S/CK F/SH that premiered at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in 2016 in a presentation by Infinite Palette, a curatorial collective dedicated to the development and presentation of composed electro-acoustic music formed by Brittelle and Wohl with Liquid Music curator-producer Kate Nordstrum. The Without Chasms EP was mixed, produced, and mastered by electronic musician and sound artist Michael Hammond of No Lands.

William Brittelle on Without Chasms:

“Without Chasms marks my first electronic release. The EP was inspired by the concept of ‘The Void,’ or nothingness. Specifically, the emotions and disorientation that arises from encountering ‘The Void,’ whether through meditation, "medication", or extreme emotional distress/elation. My own experiences approaching The Void have been marked by a somewhat disconcerting sense of interconnectedness, and inability to differentiate between things, and an overwhelming sense that reality is simply a casual network of abstract energy and emotion - hence the title, Without Chasms.”

newamrecords.org
williambrittelle.com
infinite-palette.com
nolands.org

William Brittelle - Pixote Rambo / Legions Of Osiris

New Amsterdam Records is built for the diverse musical landscape of our time. We support the projects and careers of ground-breaking post-genre composers and performers, beginning with their records and expanding out to concert presenting, network building, and a variety of other services. Your generous support of New Amsterdam, a 501(c)(3) non profit, makes our mission possible.

Dal Niente & Deerhoof - meltDown Upshot: 6. Cherubim (Marcos Balter)

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