NEU-CLASSICAL

Jacaszek's "Elegia" is taken from 'SMM: Context,' the first in a series of SMM-focused compilations featuring exclusive content from hand-picked artists. SMM is an unknown acronym used to evaporate the already-unspooling musical boundaries between classical minimalism, electronic and drone composition, film soundtracks, and fragile imaginary landscapes.  

NOTE: The 2xLP version is a limited edition of 800 units and comes in a 4-panel gatefold “tip-on” vinyl jacket (thick and heavy), 180 gram vinyl, and includes inner art sleeves. It weighs approximately 1.9 lbs.

Purchase starting March 1st and listen here: http://ghostly.com/releases/smm-context

Jacaszek- "Elegia"

Release Info: http://ghostly.com/releases/glimmer

For the past decade or so, Polish musician Michal Jacaszek has been exploring a new, resolutely modern chapter in Eastern Europe’s long, storied love affair with classical music. His creations are painstakingly crafted collages of electronic textures and baroque instrumentation, harpsichords being swarmed by woolly static one minute and pulled apart by billowing wind the next. Ambient music—if we can generalize unnecessarily for a second—is rarely so sonically challenging.

Jacaszek’s latest album, Glimmer, is marked by a noticeable tug between melancholy and beauty, like it’s hovering in some gaseous grey area between both, at once both insular and extroverted. “I tried again to create some fragile beauty glimmering behind the veil of reality,” he says. “I built a kind of curtain out of dirts and fuzzes, and used pure sound of clarinet and harpsichord playing beautiful melodies as a contrast to its harshness.” This winking, push-and-pull tension runs deep and constant throughout the 40-odd-minute journey to the end.

To parse an album so deeply experiential and deliberately cohesive track-by-track seems unfair, almost ludicrous. But there are undisputed highlights—the apocalyptic crescendo at the end of “Evening Strains To Be Time’s Vast,” with its crunch of nightmarish noise and bit-crushed distortion; the dizzying, obscenely pretty tangle of Spanish guitar in “As Each Tucked String Tells.” Glimmer is, quite simply, an album that’s easy to get lost in without being easy to ignore. Don’t expect any eyelid drooping while it’s on.

Jacaszek - Dare-gale

Pre-order the album: http://www.theghostlystore.com/products/jacaszek-glimmer
Release Info: http://ghostly.com/releases/glimmer

Jacaszek - Seiden Stille

Jacaszek - Windhover

Featuring additional synth and tabla sounds

Soniccouture Balinese Gamelan - Dogs of Bali (Featuring additional sounds)

Electric - or perhaps more fittingly electrifying - are the sounds emanating from the loudspeakers.  And all of it is unplugged.  The sounds are created by sonic.art - not only one of the finest saxophone quartets but also perhaps the most compelling chamber music formation anywhere. Featuring works by Philip Glass and Michael Nyman.

Philip Glass: String Quartet No. 3 - sonic.art Saxophone Quartet

Miracle, Mystery and Authority

Beck.  NYC  73 - 78.   from the album REWORK_Philip Glass remixed

Material originally penned for a recent tour of Japan with fellow LA artist Matthewdavid, 'Sunsets and Clocks' is a brand new EP from Anenon.
 
Consider how personal an experience it is to wait. When caught in the space of time before a thing happens, we unconsciously reveal ourselves through our ticks - physical manifestations of where we let our thoughts drift in this non-space. While waiting, each foot tapped, itch scratched and phone checked reflects the places we allow ourselves to explore before we have to jump back into formal time and space to perform.
 
Anenon recorded 'Sunsets and Clocks' in the weeks directly preceding a whirlwind tour of Japan, where expectations and preconceptions (both false and true), collided over and over again in anticipation of the trip to come. In this collection of songs, Brian Allen Simon shares that intimate space, where he was both highly conscious of the relentless march of time and simultaneously removing himself from it, delving into an inner space where the lack of time smeared memories, fantasies, and fears into one another.
 
From the title, we can start to understand his headspace during this period, where the abstract concerns and artistic preparations for an international tour to a new country constantly collided with the pragmatic, binary problems of itineraries, exchange rates, and language barriers. These conflicting drives mirror the sharp contrast of the way the smudged shades of a fading sun mark the end of the day at the same time that the precision crafted gears of a timepiece click into place. 
 
We hear this theme reflected in how these pieces are unified by their maximal approaches to contrasts in the perception of time and meter, voice and tone. Anenon plays with this contrast through the shadowy textures of rhythm in the live improvisation of "We Yearn" and the meticulously interlocking beats driving "Ghost Light" and the title track. Boldly eschewing the use of the Rhodes and piano of his previous releases, these songs instead rely on the tenor sax and synthesizer. This new pairing fully realizes the theme in the marriage of the ethereal vibrations of the lungs and haunting accuracy of the keys.
 
1. We Yearn
2. Ghost Light
3. Dreamer (for Mary Jane)
4. Sunsets and Clocks
 
Music, cover photo and design by Brian Allen Simon.

NEU-CLASSICAL

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