For me, creativity is so dependent on surroundings.  Exterior attributes like temperature, sound and even smell, play a large role in igniting creativity.  Digging further personally, maybe it’s more ‘comfort’ that opens your creative mind.  What comforts you?  Does 73 degrees Fahrenheit do the trick?  The smell of a fresh-cut lawn?  Maybe the sounds of a Harold Budd album?  I have been out in the world and heard, felt, smelled, things that have triggered a memory.  If you ever run into these things, stop and make note.  Triggers will do more than transport you back to a book-marked event, they also leave your mind wide open to new ideas.

See-Through

Under a Glass Bell

A Colour For Autumn is the second in a series of editions from Australian sound artist Lawrence English that trace the experience of seasonal transit. Following on from For Varying Degrees of Winter (published by Baskaru), A Colour For Autumn reflects on and explores the transitory nature of Autumn - counterpointing the uniformity of the ‘term’ with the varied qualities expressed by landscapes in different countries.

Like all environmental phenomena, seasonal variation is highly localised, and expressed not only visually through vegetation etc, but also sonically as insect life, leaves under foot and fauna all change in response to the climatic shifts. Northern and southern hemisphere experiences of Autumn are strikingly different and it’s also this contrast which rests at the very centre of A Colour For Autumn.

Recorded between 2007-2009, this series of pieces acts almost as small auditory portraits of given spaces in the often gentle throes of Autumn - ‘Droplet’ for example features field recordings gathered in Notre-Dame De La Garde in Marseilles, capturing the infamous ‘Mistral’ wind as it blows the first cooler breezes of Autumn into the city in 2007. By contrast ‘Watching It Unfold’ measures a more Australian experience of Autumn - a series of open static phrases, shifting ever so slightly - a reflection of the slow changes of the season around English’s home of Brisbane.

Working with a range of analog approaches, A Colour For Autumn is a tonally rich affair, sourcing much of it’s sounds from a mixture of instruments, field recordings and assorted electronics. A Colour For Autumn also features contributions from New Zealand’s Dean Roberts (whose vocals adorn the opening moments of the album) and Viennese musician Christian Fennesz, who offers intricate clusters of electronics in ‘The Surface Of Everything’.

This is an album of subtle variation, graded hues and tonal warmth, all of which act as an invitation for the listener to consider their own localised transition of Autumn.

A Colour For Autumn

Watching It Unfold

Snow Field Music Video Here, https://youtu.be/Sn3AbOj2od0

From "Unreleased Game Soundtracks"
Please check my Spotify.

GameMusic-Snow Field

Dedicado a Ana, mi sobrina, esa gran pequeña guerrera

compo20240817 (El sueño de Ana)

Taken from 'At The Dam' LP by Mary Lattimore, out March 4, 2016.

Pre-order at The Ghostly Store: http://www.theghostlystore.com/collections/music/products/at-the-dam
Or at the retailer of your choice: https://Ghostly.lnk.to/mary-lattimore-atthedam

At The Dam

Mary Lattimore - Jimmy V

Substrata 2

As the Sun Kissed the Horizon

This classic minimal music album is now available again on vinyl for the first time since the 70s.

https://www.aguirrerecords.com/collections/aguirre-records/products/terry-riley-persian-surgery-dervishes-2xlp

Californian composer Terry Riley’s In C, first issued on vinyl in 1968, is widely acknowledged as a Minimalist landmark that altered the course of twentieth-century music. His influential album A Rainbow In Curved Air, which appeared the following year, is a vivid fusion of rock and raga, jazz and psychedelia realised through overdubbing on an 8-track machine which had recently been installed at the studios of Columbia Records.  

By the early 70s Riley had come to feel that scores were a distraction. Faithful interpretation of an already written piece was a deviation from the true purpose of making music, which was spiritual quest. Fortunately, some of those live performances, personal journeys towards a state of transcendence, were captured on tape. Persian Surgery Dervishes, issued initially on the French label Shandar, features two such concerts for electric organ and reel-to-reel delay, one recorded in Los Angeles on 18th April 1971, the other in Paris on 24th May 1972.

At the start of that decade Riley became a dedicated student of the great Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath. Looking into North Indian classical tradition he found correspondences to modal and cyclic ideas that he was already working on. In 1971, as a way to learn more, Riley himself started teaching Indian music at Mills College, in Oakland. That experience fed directly into his solo keyboard performances, but other influences were also shaping the music heard on Persian Surgery Dervishes. Personal research into ancient Persian culture and the poetry of Rumi lit up his imagination, while the repetitive swirling of Sufi devotional music from North Africa, which Riley had first encountered in Europe during the early 60s, reverberates through these performances. Jazz, as conceived by such masters such as Bill Evans and John Coltrane, is also present as an enduring source of inspiration. 

The Californian version of Persian Surgery Dervishes starts with low dark tones, dense and brooding like a huddled human figure, deep in introspection. But as the improvisation unfolds Riley’s buoyant spirit asserts itself, spiralling out in ecstatic coils, as though liberated from the grip of body consciousness. The Parisian concert conveys a different mood, brighter and more open in texture, more relaxed from the outset and breathing with greater freedom as it takes flight. 

Echoes of Terry Riley’s inspired music have spread far and wide - into progressive rock, New Age and ambient soundings, film soundtracks, blissed-out electronica and dance-floor trance. His fluent and hypnotic keyboard playing can be heard as part of a continuum, transmitting energies from ancient and distant musical sources into the living here and now. Persian Surgery Dervishes is a significant part of that picture, a mesmerising record of a vital stage in Riley’s ongoing quest for connection with the universal mind and the sublime music that flows ceaselessly from it. 

“Music is my spiritual path. It’s my way of finding out who I am.”  Terry Riley, in 1976

Terry Riley - Persian Surgery Dervishes - Performance 02 Part 1

Passive Aggressive

Photo With Grey Sky, White Clouds

Anne

Treat It Like a Wine Bar

Breath Chant

Harold Budd - Templar

Root Strata has closed shop. Thanks for your support over the years.

Please no demos or links.

Jefre & Maxwell

Harold Budd - Templar

Root Strata

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