Name: Surface [Spring of Spain-snippet] by Stigander Severandre
Duration: 1 min 4 s
Description: No arrangement. Just the start of the track that started it all. surface in early 2023

Rushes Recede, from Antiphonals. Out 10th September on limited edition vinyl & CD Pre-order now → https://latemusic.ffm.to/antiphonals

Rushes Recede

Fortresses guides a pensive, ethereal meditation on the passage of time with his debut release, Eve, on Dragon’s Eye Recordings. 

A day may be observed by exact moments, counted down by the hands on a clock; or, its progress might be witnessed through less immediate means—a shift in shadows, the sky’s hue, the air as it warms and cools. 

In this sense, Fortresses both measures the day with exactitude, and honors its slower unfoldings. Each of Eve’s three carefully crafted compositions allow the listener to hone in on a singular element, or lean back into a wider gentle drone. One can pinpoint a hint of static, or drift with a melodic looping hum as it phases in and out again. 

In his own words Fortresses offered us some insight into the making of Eve: 

Eve formed slowly during a self-reflective and transformative period in my life. The songs stand as a personal document of the time they were made and the rituals that gave shape to them—watching the seasons change from my studio window, letting the colours and qualities of light inspire the compositions; and long walks in East London’s natural and urban areas where I would listen to rough edits of the tracks and record open-air sounds that blended well with the music. 

With this music, the process is compositional and very deliberate, as opposed to improvised or open-ended. The tracks are manipulated guitar and synth lines, meshed with both raw and processed field recordings, and broken chords and melodies made with a Mellotron iPhone app.

Fortresses - June

The Boy and The Tree

Secret Garden

Overground (from the Netflix Series "Top Boy")

Overground (from the Netflix Series "Top Boy") (Radio Edit)

Regret

Play On

3x12" of 'and their refinement of the decline' back in print for the first time in many years as of 8/14


stars of the lid 'piano aquieu'

No arrangement. Just the start of the track that started it all. surface in early 2023

Surface [Spring of Spain-snippet]

minor planet

Midori Hirano - Haiyuki

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

from the album 'because of a flower' available 11/13

Surface [Spring of Spain-snippet]

Stigander Severandre

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