Facsimile marks the second album by Daniel Klag for Soap Library and the tenth album to date for the New York-based artist. 

An ode to portable literature — the Duchampian ideal of brevity, unseriousness, and mysteriousness popularized in Enrique Vila-Matas’ A Brief History of Portable Literature (1985) — Facsimile searches for melody amongst the everyday. Recorded over the course of two years in small, intimate spaces — hotel rooms, train cars, a cozy Manhattan apartment — Facsimile is an audio diary for the digital age, composed on a laptop using portable instruments such as battery-powered synths and samplers interspersed with field recordings sourced from East Coast hiking trips spanning Acadia to Asheville. Nature and artifice blend in equal, eerie measure. Album opener “False Start” finds birds chirping amongst the bleeps and bloops of a synthesizer, while “Colloquial Mode” and “Bliss Control” balance the gentle pitter-patter of a furry companion set against melancholic chords. Klag’s longtime inspirations — Cluster and Harmonia, guided by the ever-present Eno — leave their kosmische mark. 

Literary heads may recognize similarities to Georges Perec’s pint-sized classic An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1982), in which the author spent three days recording everything that passed through his field of vision in Place Saint-Sulpice. Like Perec, Klag delights in the “infra ordinary” — the markings and manifestations of the everyday that consistently escape our attention. Facsimile embraces the static and fuzz of these in-between moments, demonstrating that there is strength in smallness and that our existence is, at its core, simply rhythm. 

Daniel Klag is a solo musician residing in New York City. His output spans multiple labels including Muzan Editions, Patient Sounds, Constellation Tatsu, AMDISCS, and Soap Library. Known for dense and syrupy compositions, Klag’s signature sounds are constructed using isolated samples of acoustic and electric instruments, digitally abstracted and stretched in time.

Facsimile releases on Friday, October 4, 2024 in cassette and digital formats via Soap Library. A hand-embossed notebook measuring just slightly larger than the tape itself accompanies each cassette — a nod to smallness in paperback form. 

©2024 Soap Library // www.soaplibrary.net

Daniel Klag – Colloquial Mode

Daniel Klag – Facsimile

Following her debut soundtrack for Today, I Will Be The Bread comes Break Break, a new soundtrack from composer and multi-instrumentalist Eve Essex. Directed by Haldean Brown and written by Sarah Marsh, Break Break follows an apocalypse survivor as she struggles with loneliness and paralysis in the face of uncertainty. Containing no dialog and only sporadic voiceover permeated by empty radio waves and gentle forest sounds, the film’s emotional tenor is propelled by its expressive electroacoustic score.

Set in a depopulated world amongst the Sonoma redwoods, Break Break echoes the isolation and apprehension of pandemic-era quarantine. A ham radio serves as the film’s central motif and provides percussion samples for the titular “Break Break.” Swinging between woozy abandon and frenetic alertness, the track posits dance as its own means of survival at the film's visually and sonically pulsating climax. Meanwhile, a delicate soprano saxophone in “Comfort” and the almost-canon structure of “Around I Go” bring a contemporary spin to kosmische-esque moments, evoking soundtracks of Tangerine Dream and Irmin Schmidt. Taken as a whole, Essex’s electroacoustic score maps the emotional highs and lows that drive the film’s exploration of risk – what are you willing to leave behind, and for what reason?

Break Break includes explorations of scale and through-composed arrangements that are new to Essex’s recordings. Multi-tracked combinations of voices, soprano saxophone, flute, piccolo, and clarinet are layered into beds of orchestrated synthesizers, creating textures and densities not yet heard in her work. The 12 tracks comprising Break Break mark a major shift for Essex to a production-forward process, serving as a sonic midpoint between her debut solo record, Here Appear (2018), and the expanded big-band character of her forthcoming second album, The Fabulous Truth (spring 2024). 

Eve Essex is a multi-instrumentalist and composer based in Brooklyn, NY. She performs with woodwinds and voice, accompanied by instrumental ensembles, and by electronic arrangements that use live processing, synthesizers, drum machines, and other sounds. Operating between songwriting, composition, and instrumental improvisation, her work slides easily from structured electronic pop to open-ended melodic explorations and big-band arrangements. Her practice has spanned media and genres over time — including soundtracks, installation and performance art, and the prog, jazz, and electroacoustic ideas explored with an assortment of collaborative combinations including The Fabulous Truth, Das Audit, and others. Her debut solo album, Here Appear, was jointly released by Soap Library (cassette) and Sky Walking (LP) in 2018. Essex’s second solo album, The Fabulous Truth, will be released by Soap Library in spring 2024. 

Haldean Brown is an Oakland-based film director and Pixar computer programmer whose works detail our relationships to nature and the ways technology both gathers and isolates us. Break Break is his third live-action film as a director, after Great Job and The Time Traveling Cougar. Brown served as Effects Lead for the animated short Pete, which premiered in 2023 at the Tribeca Film Festival and won the Jury Prize at Festival d’Annecy.

Sarah Marsh is a Polish-Mexican screenwriter whose cross-genre dramas explore the broad spectrum of queer relationships, with a focus on female-identifying protagonists. Break Break is her second short film, followed by Buzz, a female-centric thriller. She is a graduate of the UCLA Professional Program in Writing for Television.

Eve Essex’s soundtrack to Break Break releases on Friday, February 24, 2024 in digital formats via Soap Library. 

©2024 Soap Library // www.soaplibrary.net

Break Break

Eve Essex – Knowing You're Out There

Eve Essex – Other People's Decisions

The Fabulous Truth is an homage to the anti-hero — an eight song suite that explores moral ambiguities, life in the shadows, and the possibility of escape from social expectations. The second full-length album by composer and multi-instrumentalist Eve Essex, The Fabulous Truth is both an ecstatic paean to liberty and an intense look at the psychological prices paid for seeking independence in an unforgiving world.

Drawing on influences as diverse as trip-hop, outlaw country, kosmische, spiritual jazz, avant-garde classical, and — yes — musical theater, Essex sets jewel-like portraits of rebellion against a velvet-black background of stormy electronics and uneasy minimalism. The album treats genre with a freewheeling attitude, and Essex’s confident sound is augmented by musicians including guitarists jenghis and Luke Moldof, and downtown New York music legend Peter Zummo on trombone and euphonium. Intimate lyrics—confessional in tone, literary, striking in their bold mutations of classic songwriting genres—are contrasted with brooding compositions that evoke long journeys across vast landscapes and continents; wagon trains and ship voyages taken in pursuit of a new life, the view from a satellite orbiting the Earth at high speed. The Fabulous Truth is an album about freedom and boundaries, intimacy and security, raising questions about who you let into your life and why.

Eve Essex is a composer and multi-instrumentalist based in Brooklyn, NY. She performs with woodwinds and voice, accompanied by instrumental ensembles, and by arrangements that use synthesizers, drum machines, live processing, and other sounds. Her work slides easily from structured electronic pop to open-ended melodic improvisation and big-band arrangements. She has scored film soundtracks, written music for installation and performance art, and explored prog, jazz, and electroacoustic ideas with groups including The Fabulous Truth, Das Audit, and a host of other collaborations. Essex’s debut solo album, Here Appear, was jointly released by Soap Library (cassette) and Sky Walking (LP) in 2018. In the summer of 2024, she will be Composer In Residence at Crosstown Arts in Memphis, TN. As a featured instrumentalist, she has contributed to works by The God In Hackney, Peter Gordon & Love of Life Orchestra, James K, Kevin Kenkel, Liturgy, Colin Self, Mike Shiflet, UCC Harlo, and Peter Zummo, among others.

The Fabulous Truth releases on June 21, 2024 via Soap Library in digital, cassette, and LP formats — a first for the label. Cassettes are accompanied by an embroidered patch that mirrors James JA Mercer’s cover artwork.

The Fabulous Truth

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Eve Essex — Honeypot feat. Peter Zummo

Soap Library is tickled pink to release the original soundtrack for That Paradise Place, an erotic puppet musical about the love, sex, and fantasy lives of artists with disabilities debuting at Abrons Art Center on November 1 & 2, 2024. 

Created and performed by Pussypaws Puppetry under the guidance of sisters Priscilla Frank and Alana Hauser, the freewheeling musical is supported by colorful cast of visual artists, musicians, and performers with and without disabilities and and presented by Summertime Gallery, a Brooklyn-based studio, gallery, and residency for neurodiverse artists. Indie rocker and high school teacher Graeme Daubert heads up composition, arrangement, and recording duties. 

The album’s twelve songs — all titled a derivative of “... is Full of Love” — take risks and embrace silliness. The creation of each song began with a first-person story shared by an artist with a disability. These stories then embarked on a collaborative, alchemical journey – they were adapted into songs, adopted by puppet alter-egos, embodied via dazzling, larger-than-life puppets, and finally brought to life on the big stage.

In a culture that often overlooks the internal worlds and erotic desires of people with disabilities, That Paradise Place forms a creative community where all facets of our humanity are worthy of being seen, sung, and celebrated — a shame-free space where creation is an act of love, and love is an act of creativity.

The soundtrack to That Paradise Place is available on Friday, November 1, 2024 alongside a sachet of dried rosebuds, a soft nod to the flower behind the puppet troupe’s name and a humble reminder that pleasure and sensuality are all around us. Shop generously — proceeds support Pussypaws Puppetry in achieving its next big puppet dream! 

©2024 Soap Library

www.soaplibrary.net
www.pussypawspuppetry.org
www.summertimegallery.org

That Paradise Place

Pussypaws Puppetry — Sensual Massage is Full of Love

Soap Library is tickled pink to release the original soundtrack for That Paradise Place, an erotic puppet musical about the love, sex, and fantasy lives of artists with disabilities debuting at Abrons Art Center on November 1 & 2, 2024. 

Created and performed by Pussypaws Puppetry under the guidance of sisters Priscilla Frank and Alana Hauser, the freewheeling musical is supported by colorful cast of visual artists, musicians, and performers with and without disabilities and and presented by Summertime Gallery, a Brooklyn-based studio, gallery, and residency for neurodiverse artists. Indie rocker and high school teacher Graeme Daubert heads up composition, arrangement, and recording duties. 

The album’s twelve songs — all titled a derivative of “... is Full of Love” — take risks and embrace silliness. The creation of each song began with a first-person story shared by an artist with a disability. These stories then embarked on a collaborative, alchemical journey — adapted into songs, adopted by puppet alter-egos, embodied via dazzling, larger-than-life puppets, and finally brought to life on the big stage.

In a culture that often overlooks the internal worlds and erotic desires of people with disabilities, That Paradise Place forms a creative community where all facets of our humanity are worthy of being seen, sung, and celebrated — a shame-free space where creation is an act of love, and love is an act of creativity.

The soundtrack to That Paradise Place is available on Friday, November 1, 2024 alongside a sachet of dried rosebuds, a soft nod to the flower behind the puppet troupe’s name and a humble reminder that pleasure and sensuality are all around us. Shop generously — proceeds support Pussypaws Puppetry in achieving its next big puppet dream! 

©2024 Soap Library

www.soaplibrary.net
www.pussypawspuppetry.org
www.summertimegallery.org

Pussypaws Puppetry — Dinosaur Robot is Full of Love

Sometimes it’s the familiar things that get you. Microfibers, the self-titled debut release by visual artists and musical collaborators Jonny Campolo, Keegan Monaghan, and Eugene Wasserman, makes the everyday strange — conjuring up an intensity that belies its unassuming title, surfing the tension between the warmth of its communal effort and cool-to-the-touch presentation.

Microfibers is an otherworldly transmission from known territory. Recorded at Brooklyn’s totemic BC Studios — helmed by the same Martin Bisi who has presided over a host of avant classics in Gowanus since the 80s — the two-track album is mere degrees of separation from its influence. BC Studios was built with Brian Eno to make Ambient 4: On Land (1982), an out-there favorite at the heart of Microfibers’ inspirational cosmos. Its core and peripheral contributors are now standbys of the greater New York art and art-adjacent music scenes, drawing from a similar set of influences spanning film music, ambient, and free-improvisational styles.

Familiarities aside, there’s nothing quite like Microfibers. It bathes in the uncanny, a subtle and all-the-more destabilizing twist on the normal. As with its ambient and minimalist forebears, the album’s twin tracks consciously create a space rather than blending into the background — an oblique pushback to the anesthetizing playlist ambient that soundtracks our outer lives. While Microfibers can resemble soundtrack music in its patience, it is more filmic than a typical score would allow, with its own suggestive narrative and heady atmosphere. Tension and release, dissonance and consonance, and attack and sustain all shed their expected expressive functions. The mood is resolutely ambivalent, spaciously claustrophobic, serenely tense.

Clocking in at just over 18 minutes, “Glass of Water” creeps in on a hesitant harp arpeggio from Shelley Burgon, patiently unfolding alongside increasingly insistent background thrums and hits. The meditative quality of the Italian avant-garde is present, but the sense of repose is slightly askew, as Burgon’s microtonal plucks fold in gently alongside blocks of sonic shade and grit. Meanwhile, “Tiers” smolders with overdubbed saxophones courtesy of fellow Soap Librarian Eve Essex, splitting the difference between haunted overdubs and lockdown dread. As bell-like sounds — evocative of a forgotten herd on a far-off knoll — rise in the mix, metal-splinterings from a prepared piano jar the listener from their reverie.

The recording process laid the groundwork for its multivalent listening experience. Beginning as motifs drawn from long improvisations, the music slowly grew into a hybrid improv-composition, as the trio overlaid responses to their initial gestures using guitar, synth, and a range of other instruments to dialogue with themselves asynchronously. The result is a controlled, musical aleatoric, evoking the wistful feeling of a chance encounter; a fleeting conversation with a passerby that lingers in the memory. Despite its connection to the canon of experimental minimalism, the album as a whole conjures a contemporary feeling, one that is fraught with both tension and possibility. Microfibers contains a lot, but conceals as much as it reveals, inviting you to dwell in its liminality a little longer.

Microfibers releases on Friday, May 9, 2025 on Soap Library in vinyl LP, cassette, and digital formats, accompanied by a double-sided 20-strike matchbook. Jump in, the water’s warm – but so is the flame.

©2025 Soap Library // www.soaplibrary.net

Microfibers

Microfibers — Glass of Water

Are more men in your life a good thing? Kevin Kenkel has some ideas. 

Over the past years, the Brooklyn composer has built up a body of work that unleashes a tangle of modular synthesizers to map out the networks we use to connect with each other — socially, sexually, sadly, hopefully. His self-released debut album, Will You Please Let Me Pour My Heart Out? (2021) reached out to the world like a cat bathing in the sun, aching for a rub. His second album, and first for Soap Library, Break All the Bones in Your Heart (2024), hosted guests such as Colin Self, Eve Essex, Adam Tendler — and a few ghostly samples — for a series of intimate encounters. What developed was a suite of songs that, like love itself, remain irresistible in their mystery. 

Break All the Bones in Your Heart standout “Imaginary Boyfriend (Elodie’s Haunted Memory Version)” now plays the field on Kenkel’s new EP, Imaginary Boyfriend: Versions, for which he commissioned a series of remixes — and added a few of his own. 

Originally a three-way between Tendler’s aching piano, waves of distortion, and a few words from the late microtonalist Elodie Lauten, “Imaginary Boyfriend: Piano Version” strips Tendler’s performance to bare bones, with only a bit of room tone, warm as blush. The result is handsome yet lonely — a lover with nimble fingers and stamina. “Imaginary Boyfriend: Original Version” mirrors Tendler’s solo performance with one of Kenkel’s own — an offering of the seminal composition for synth. Its slow and steady analog arpeggios keep time with the kickdrum’s gentle pound — a reminder that sometimes you’ve already got what you need. 

Maybe a duo would suit you better. “Imaginary Boyfriend: Beat Detectives Remix” brings in the venerable New York pair for a heavy dub session. Here, a rustling bed of filtered drums opens the door for Kenkel’s modular hooks, with curious vocal samples making for excellent pillowtalk. Ready for self-reflection? “Imaginary Boyfriend: Dub Version” takes its time exploring the original’s solid frame, probing the harmonics, flexing the rhythm to let the ventricles pump, creating a space for the song to shiver and contract, then relax and rise again. It’s not so much a reinvention as a generous linger — an invitation to stay just a little bit longer. On the other hand, “Imaginary Boyfriend: Arcade Mode” revels in playing games. If the original version seduced you with its soft languorous sounds, this one flirts with 8-bit toxins. Game over, but give it time — a bad date eventually becomes a good story. 

Perhaps though, this is all too intense, as simple affection is often the hardest to find. Open your eyes to “Imaginary Boyfriend: Tropical Version” — a warm suspension, sonically bathing in self-care, a moist furrow through which synth lines gradually glisten. The mix leaves long echoes like stains — afterglow made aural. In the end, what more could you want? 

If things get dark — and in matters of love and lust, they always do — then Imaginary Boyfriend has just the right tool. Imaginary Boyfriend: Versions is available via Soap Library on May 2, 2025 in digital and cassette tape formats; the physical version comes with a pocket-sized flashlight keychain. Snap it on your belt loop and thrust yourself into the shadows — you’ve got a reliable pathfinder to where, or to whom, you’re finally headed.

©2025 Soap Library // www.soaplibrary.net

Kevin Kenkel — Imaginary Boyfriend feat. Adam Tendler (Piano Version)

Kevin Kenkel — Imaginary Boyfriend (Arcade Mode)

Kevin Kenkel — Imaginary Boyfriend (Dub Version)

Kevin Kenkel — Imaginary Boyfriend (Beat Detectives Remix)

Kevin Kenkel — Imaginary Boyfriend (Tropical Version)

Ayuyu Cave, the new record by New York-based artist, educator, and designer Crystal Peñalosa, is a darkly alluring meditation on identity, family, and history, rendered through a blend of high-level sound design and snippets of dialogue. The fifth recorded work in Peñalosa’s oeuvre, Ayuyu Cave marks a continued exploration of her Chamoru heritage — the Indigenous culture of the Mariana Islands and Guam — while leaving space for critical reflections on (de)colonization.  

The five tracks that comprise Ayuyu Cave dream of a future that transcends Western concepts of the individual versus the collective as means of liberation. By stepping outside of these dichotomies, the work embraces the entwined narratives of transness and queerness — at once self-transformative and self-realizing — while raising the question of how to reclaim one’s past without fetishizing it. In doing so, Peñalosa’s work connects to artists such as Chuquimamani-Condori, who reconfigure past, future, individuality, and collectivity towards a better present for us all.  

But the music itself is quite different from the latter’s sample-delic maximalism. Drawing on a diverse yet cohesive soundscape of synthesized tones, Ayuyu Cave is created entirely using Peñalosa’s custom-made sound generators and processors. Shards of conversation emerge in the mix, retracing her matrilineal legacy of caring for the marine land. What might be seen as a mere commitment to DIY ethics instead takes on promethean undertones, folding back into the album’s narrative of self-realization. Raw electricity is fashioned into drums, and cavernous tones take shape through a creative deployment of reverb. 

All of which brings us to the cave. Ayuyu Cave borrows its name from an important cave network in northeast Guam — described in a 2022 hydrological analysis as a site of “inscrutable speleological complexity” whose features “are overprinted such that the sequence, timing, and durations of genetic conditions and associated events cannot be discerned.”¹ Despite never having set foot on Guam, Peñalosa could be said to be “from” there, revealing an existential ambiguity that is mirrored by the cave itself. What is a cave, but a void? It is a negative space, whose very not-ness is a condition of its existence. Ayuyu Cave is full of such reversals — it is ambient music that is full of hard edges; born of synthesizers yet fully organic; clinical and cold in one moment, warm and alive in the next. Thinking through the age-old problem of how to wire the new from the old, the album poses the question — Are we just who we are, or are we defined by where we are from and what we do? To all of the above, it simply answers “yes.”

Crystal Peñalosa is an electronic musician and interdisciplinary designer exploring self-compassion, authenticity, and personal safety. She has released music independently and through Topos Press, and has presented solo and collaborative works at The New School, MoMA PS1, Roulette, Issue Project Room, among others. She serves as a Product Designer with the New Jersey Office of Innovation, teaches Physical Computing at the School of Visual Arts, and volunteers with Voluminous Arts, a transgender liberation project in Queens, New York.

Ayuyu Cave releases on Soap Library on Friday, September 26, 2025 in cassette and digital formats. Each pea-green tape is accompanied by a tablespoon of annatto seeds — a key ingredient in Chamoru red rice. 

¹ Villareal, M.; Jenson, J.; King, R.; and Aban, E. (2022). Hydrogeological characterization of a high-discharge coastal freshwater karst spring system (Publication No. 176). Water and Environmental Research Institute (WERI) of the Western Pacific University of Guam.

©2025 Soap Library // www.soaplibrary.net

Crystal Peñalosa — Asking the Aniti for Permission

Soap Library is (once again!) tickled pink to release the original soundtrack to Pussypaws Pleasure Faire, a Renaissance-era fever dream celebrating the sex, love, and fantasy lives of artists with disabilities. The full-bodied romp — conceived, directed, and performed by Pussypaws Puppetry — premiered to sold-out audiences at Center for Performance Research on May 29-30, 2025.

Following the delightfully unbridled 2024 release of That Paradise Place — an erotic puppet featuring 12 original songs — Pussypaws Pleasure Faire expands upon the troupe's yearslong quest to celebrate the sex, love, and fantasy lives of artists with disabilities. 

Brought to life by a spirited community of artists with and without disabilities under the auspices of sisters Priscilla Frank and Alana Hauser, Pussypaws Pleasure Faire was incubated during an eight-day technical residency at CPR in Brooklyn. Days began with puppet building, afternoons were spent blocking, and nights descended into raucous rehearsals. Over 50 artists passed through the process, conjuring a ribald Renaissance world brimming with turkey legs, masquerade masks, slippery pickles, and medieval mischief.

The final production featured five artists with disabilities  — Ellie Sondock, Ky Wyman, Ariella Kadosh, Anton Spivack, and Kenneth Youngblood Jr. — performing live retellings of their erotic adventures and desires, with monologues interlaced with group musical numbers, medieval jokes, and puppet pageantry. Tales of masquerade hookups, frogs that transform into men, and a love triangle between a water wench, a musician, and a juggler unfolded to a live soundtrack by Jonny Campolo and saxophonist Chase Ceglie — dubbed the “Lude Lewts.” In a culture that so often sidelines the erotic lives of disabled people, Pussypaws Pleasure Faire creates an unabashed, shame-free space where bawdiness and creativity converge — inviting audiences to get weird, feel good, and share in the joyful experience of being alive. 

The soundtrack to Pussypaws Pleasure Faire is available in cassette and digital formats on Friday, October 31, 2025 alongside a hand-knit miniature pickle (😊).  Shop generously — proceeds support Pussypaws Puppetry in achieving its next big puppet dream!

©2025 Soap Library
www.soaplibrary.net
www.pussypawspuppetry.org

Pussypaws Puppetry — The Pleasure Faire

Returned To Earth names twelve minutes of music by harpist Mary Lattimore and Soap Library’s sophomore release. The two tracks that make up this limited edition tape, like alternating sides of a shiny coin, share Lattimore’s trademark grace but vary in conception.

A-side offering “For Scott Kelly, Returned to Earth” was written for its namesake man + moment—the American astronaut’s homecoming from a year spent living aboard the International Space Station. Kelly’s ship-to-shore transmissions via social media redefined our image of the Astronaut from intrepid explorer to something of an omniscient, benevolent spirit. Orbiting, watching, he posted updates on his orange zinnia (#spaceflower), aerial shots of great rivers and their curious zig-zags (#earthart), a moon rise, an aurora borealis. Lattimore followed and marveled at the sincerity in Kelly’s extreme, singular solitude. She fortuitously fell and fractured her jaw that winter, necessitating it be wired shut in order to heal. Undergoing two months without the ability to speak, Lattimore was confined to a strange isolation. Come spring, jaw healed and soul inspired, Mary wrote a song for Scott Kelly as he returned to Earth after his final, year-long mission aboard the ISS—a new “Space Oddity” for the Aquarian Age.

Lattimore and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma crossed paths in the high desert plains of Marfa, Texas and reunited to jam + record in New York City shortly thereafter. “Borrego Springs” is six minutes of beautifully balanced improvisations from this day spent together and completes Returned To Earth. Lattimore’s painterly flourishes are grounded by Ledesma’s expressive interplay of piano, guitar and the very room itself—leaving one instrument to reverberate while crossing the space to re-activate the other. The resulting piece evolves the harp from a categorically solitary instrument to the anchor and root of this unique collaboration.

Each cassette is paired with a hand-stickered envelope containing a palmful of heirloom orange zinnia seeds, care instructions, and digital download card. Soap Library will donate every dollar received from Bandcamp sales of this release to the Sierra Club. Please purchase with purpose and help us to protect our planetary home.

Purchase via Soap Library: bit.ly/returned-to-earth-sl

©2017 Soap Library // www.soaplibrary.net

Returned To Earth

Mary Lattimore — Borrego Springs (ft. Jefre Cantu-Ledesma)

Jacob Becker — Always Already / Everybody Wins

Here Appear is an invocation, a salutation, and a celebration — of past and perfect lives, forgotten and remembered, exchanged and borrowed.

Eve Essex’s solo debut is a multi-instrumental fea(s)t combining synthesizer, drum machine, alto saxophone, piccolo, electric organ/harpsichord, harmonica, slide whistle, bells, guitar pedals, and voice— composed, arranged, and performed by Essex herself. What began as an improv set at Berlin’s Harlekin bar developed, over the past two years, into a complete body of work evoking multiple time periods, genres, characters, and sonic landscapes. The seven tracks that make up Here Appear harness elements of classical, drone, avant-jazz, and distorted pop, coupled with an ambitious vocal delivery that draws on the phrasing and articulations of Essex’s own woodwind playing, to create a quasi-narrative mélange retaining the vulnerability of live performance. On the opening track “Grind Away,” otherworldly harmonica strains set the stage for lyrics citing Chinese sci-fi novel The Third Body Problem as source material. Saxophone and piccolo interludes “Immediate Communicator” and “Colorless Stone” move between medieval-tinged melodic inventions and textural noise, recalling a Pharoah Sanders-influenced fever dream, while the linguistic abstractions of Russian conceptual poet Lev Rubinstein guide the looped, layered, and textured vocals of title track “Here Appear.” The album closes with a languid take on Jacqueline Humbert & David Rosenboom’s 1978 composition “Clear Light” from My New Music, recently reissued by Unseen Worlds.

Here Appear owes its minimal production to the conditions of its genesis, evidencing the restrained process of the solo artist; instrumentation is confined to what can be played simultaneously. True to the album’s avant-garde roots, each song involves an element of improvisation, often taking the form of prompts or variations on a melody rather than explicit compositions. Even its most structured pieces make use of live-sampled loops, which inject a spirited unpredictability into the songwriting process and subsequent performance.

Classically trained in bassoon at New England Conservatory before receiving a BFA in sculpture from RISD, Eve Essex has performed as a solo artist at Artists Space, Commend, Safe Gallery, Signal, Trans Pecos, and U.S. Blues, in New York, Harlekin/Mathew Gallery and StudioAcht in Berlin, and the PUFFERSS Festival in Providence, RI. In addition to her solo practice, Essex regularly performs as one half of Das Audit (with Craig Kalpakjian), as well as in trios Hesper (with James K and Via App) and HEVM (with MV Carbon and  Hunter Hunt-Hendrix), and has collaborated extensively with Juan Antonio Olivares as installation/performance-art duo Essex Olivares.

Here Appear arrives via New York City-based label Soap Library on March 9, 2018 in both cassette and digital format, mastered by Helmut Erler at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Each tape includes a tactile complement — Justin Q. Martin’s cover artwork in the form of an embroidered patch. The LP release, from Berlin-based imprint Sky Walking, will follow in April 2018.

©2018 Soap Library // www.soaplibrary.net // www.eveessex.com

Here Appear

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Eve Essex — Satisfaction Theories

Gryphon Rue is a transdisciplinary composer, author, and curator with roots in Woodstock and Greenwich Village. The seven tracks that comprise Foliage of Caves, Rue’s debut album for Soap Library, trace a kaleidoscopic yet unassuming trip through electro-acoustic textures composed using a wholly unique instrument — the saw.

What is an instrument but a tool for a certain task? By modifying the task of the saw, we redefine its purpose, thereby entering a world of opposites: if the saw’s use is separation, here it is one of connecting disparate sounds. If the saw’s value is measured by its ability to make a finished product, here it is measured by its ability to guide the listener through open-ended compositions. If the saw’s aura is that of cold, metallic serrations, here it is warm and rounded.

These reversals aren’t just process-based parlor tricks, but describe a modern struggle of technological subversion at the hands of enterprising artists. Futurist John Naisbitt offers the term “high touch” to describe human subversion of techno-logic: “embracing technology that preserves our humanness and rejecting technology that intrudes upon it.” We are also forced to concede that “tech” is a continual process of our application and creative mis-use of commodified inventions. The saw is a physical instrument, immediate and pure. An ordinary tool, in Rue’s hands it produces almost electronic sounds. In service to the ordinary and the enigma which dwells within it, through the inducement of meditative states with gently fluctuating interference patterns, Foliage of Caves traces a zone of concentrated intricacy; offering a pleasurable antidote to the suspended abstraction that comes with increasing digitization.

As a member of the light and sound duo Rue Bainbridge, the merging of Rue’s saw and electronics puts the ethos of “high touch” into practice. In Foliage of Caves, this strategy drives a great range of meticulously crafted and, at times, aleatoric sounds.

Last summer Rue visited Luray Caverns in Virginia. As he puts it, “ancient calcium deposits hung like icicles at a fish market. I was mesmerized by pools of water reflecting stalactites, 200 feet underground in a mirror image, like standing inside crocodile jaws. The pools were crystal clear. Every so often, drips from the growing stalactites disturbed the water and shattered the illusion.”

As digital-industrial products collect around us like a blinking snowbank, the animate warmth that imbues Foliage of Caves suggests that a solution to life’s problems isn’t promethean technological conquest, but a return to our fleshy bodies and faculties of attention, in which a happenstance ray of light across one’s face in the morning has the power to supersede the most rigorously conceived and executed device. Reflection is a renewable resource — which, in 2020, is exactly the kind of foresight we need.

©2020 Soap Library // www.soaplibrary.net

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