Artist: Giant Claw
Album: Mirror Guide
Format: Digital / Vinyl
Release: May 7 or 14, 2021

Music by Keith Rankin
Visual art by Ellen Thomas and Keith Rankin
Mastered by Starkey

Artist Statement:

I have been recording Mirror Guide off and on since my previous album Soft Channel came out in 2017, working on pieces in my spare time while co-running Orange Milk Records and trying to make a living as a freelance visual artist. 

I wanted Mirror Guide to feel less frenzied than some of my previous music, and decided to use a hyperreal string sound as a lead instrument the rest of the sounds could orbit around. I improvised long stretches with the digital instrument and picked moments that elicited some emotional response in me as the foundation for each piece. It helped to imagine a small synthetic ensemble playing every additional part, considering the choices an individual might make if they were focused primarily on their instruments’ role within the group. 

In my improvised sessions I also gravitated towards what I called a ‘bouncing ball’ rhythm - later described to me as an exponential rhythmic sequence. After thinking about how genres often center around a core rhythmic pattern I adopted the sequence as another consistent feature for the album. 

In the past I’ve cut up pop acapellas as vocal elements, but on Mirror Guide decided to work with several artists I had come to know from three very different music scenes. I traveled to Pittsburgh for a few days and recorded with vocalist Tamar Kamin (from the band the Van Allen Belt) generating hours of improvised and lightly prepared melodic material that I later edited into several songs. I also incorporated more poetic almost spoken word vocals from Japanese musician and photographer NTsKi and a small segment of screeching moans from fellow Ohioan Diana Gruber. 

More generally I found inspiration from artists like Paul Lansky, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and the range of emotion in the music of Geinoh Yamashirogumi Orchestra, best known for scoring the Akira soundtrack which is a longtime favorite. I was also encouraged to complete Mirror Guide through conversations with the late composer, tape collage pioneer, and friend Noah Creshevsky, who gave me several boosts of confidence after hearing early versions of the music.

Giant Claw - Mir-Cam Startup

Tim Hecker - Neither More Nor Less

Whole Numbers Play the Basics

Moonlupe

The Possible Light

Trad Velecido

Sakura

Kirakiraboshi

Tobiume

trade winds, white heat-Tim Hecker

Symbol

Long Long Silk Bridge

Puce Mary — The Drought
Format: LP / CD / Digital
Cat.No. PAN 87
Release Date: 5 October 2018 
Pre-order album: bit.ly/2KGmn9f / bit.ly/2KGL7Ot

Building from a reputation of arresting live performances and critically acclaimed releases Puce Mary breaks new ground with The Drought, evolving from the tropes of industrial and power electronics to forge a complex story of adapting to new realities. Remnants of noise still exist, sustaining the penetrative viscerality offered on previous records, however The Drought demonstrates an intention to expand on the vocabulary of confrontational music and into a grander narrative defined by technical and emotional growth.

Bringing together introspective examination with literary frameworks by writers such as Charles Baudelaire and Jean Genet, Puce Mary’s compositions manifest an ongoing power struggle within the self towards preservation. The traumatised body serves as a dry landscape of which obscured memories and escape mechanisms fold reality into fiction, making sense of desire, loss and control. The Drought presents both danger and opportunity; through rebuilding a creative practice centred on first person narrative and a deliberate collage of field recordings and sound sources Puce Mary injects an acute urgency across the album seeking resilience.

“To Possess Is To Be In Control” makes use of lyrical repetition as an ambiguity of two selves, or a divided self, attempting to consume one another, while “Red Desert,” named after Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 film, portrays the individual subsumed by surrounding environmental forces. The seven-minute epic “The Size of Our Desires” acts as the emotional tipping point of the record; amongst the ominous drone and dense feedback flutters almost-beatific melodies, while the lyrics reveal a romantic call to be swept up in the midst of an increasingly uninhabitable world.

Rather than escape, The Drought dramatises a metamorphosis in which vulnerability is confronted through regeneration. Noise and aggression no longer act as an affront to react against but part of a ‘corporeal architecture’ where space, harmony and lyricism surface from the harsh tropes of industrial music. The Drought chronologises a transformation through a psychological famine, new ways of coping akin to plant survival in a desert – to live without drying out.

The release is mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring art by Torbjørn Rødland

@pucemary
p-a-n.org

The Drought

Puce Mary -  A Feast Before The Drought (PAN 87)

BIG DUMB MAN

BIG DUMB MAN

Jethro Sapon

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