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LP
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NNF 206LP
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Repressed, 2010 release. "Brian Pyle is well-known for his enterprising shamanism as one half of Nor Cal improv gurus Starving Weirdos but when off-roading in his Ensemble Economique buggy he seems to stumble onto even weirder psychogenic artifacts. Psychical is Pyle's freshest full-length and easily his most drugged and dense. Thick, humid banks of synth-fog descend over looped cult hand-drum patterns, strangely panned waves of brainwash tones, and snippets of third world voices mumbling about blood and marijuana. As the name half-jokingly implies, EE is 100% Pyle's creation instrument-wise, although his wife Phoenix does intone some possessed doom poetry over the crushing war drums of 'Forever Eyes' and Tom Carter (of Charalambides) cameos with some searing white light guitar shrapnel on the creep-out raga of 'Real Things.' All the pieces dissolve into one another, giving Psychical a dark-trip soundtrack mood, an upriver lost soul convoy into hostile off-radar territories, a thousand spectral voices misting down like blackening monsoon clouds. A total haunter, and an LP we've been spinning many midnights around NNF HQ. Black vinyl LPs in jackets with occult VHS artwork by Manda Beth Brown."
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LP
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AMIRW 032LP
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"Brian Pyle is Ensemble Economique. This is the first LP release from Ensemble Economique. Digitalis issued the At the Foot of Nameless Roads CD in 2008. Both recordings are important primers to Pyle's nascent invocations of Holger Czukay's Cannaxis (on No GPS) and Karlheinz Stockhausen's Kontake (on At the Foot). With Standing Still, Facing Forward Ensemble Economique provides the most mature realization of Pyle's compositional process, which utilizes found sounds, field recordings, and musical performance that he later meticulously edits, layers, and loops in the studio. The effects of these processes are dramatic, cinematic and conceptually rigorous and this recording evidences Pyle as an important new composer emerging out of the long and storied tradition of West Coast experimentalism. Utilizing a delicate combination of the homespun improvisation of his other project, Starving Weirdos (whose work sounds like an American echo of AMM) with his own unique variation on the European avant-garde in Ensemble Economique, Pyle's practice involves a dense approach to composition akin to assemblage. But unlike electronic and laptop composition, Pyle's studio work aims to re-establish an organicism associated with live (or, in the case of the field recordings, lived) performance that pushes the studio out into nature and nature into the studio. In short, the Northern Californian landscape plays an integral part in Ensemble Economique's soundscapes, and this record captures much of the atmosphere of Pyle's home terrain." LP comes wrapped in a letter-pressed band and contains a 16-page art book.
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