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LP
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SLP 044LP
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Singular avant-garde voice Ashley Paul commits a bewitching debut to Slip with Lost In Shadows; a tender yet discordant suite inspired by her new role as mother to a young child. Few would call Ashley's music "easy", but it is also heavily rewarding in its own, uncompromising way and now finds its audience on the acclaimed Slip imprint amid a roster of boundary-morphing composers including Chaines, Mica Levi & Oliver Coates, Yeah You, and Laurie Tompkins. Recorded over three weeks at FUGA in Zaragoza, Spain and premiered at Counterflows 2017, on Lost In Shadows the multi-instrumentalist plays guitar, sax, clarinet, voice, and percussion. In a mark of distance traveled since her last album, however, she draws on recent collaborations and work with pre-eminent composers such as Rashad Becker, Lucy Railton, and Rhys Chatham to also delegate roles to a new ensemble of players on tuba, baritone sax, cello and percussion, who serve to render the dynamics of her music with stronger attention to bass rhythms and intricate, iridescent dissonance. The expanded personnel lend new flesh to Ashley's work, hinging around her tremulous vocals and bringing her ideas to life in 11 parts that hold to a perceptive knife edge between lullaby-like and restlessly tooth-achy: mixing the off-key filigree of her vocals at asymmetric tonal angles to the instrumentals -- a solution of jazz, chamber music, modern composition, and folk craft expressing a complexity of ideas that may well have fallen apart if handled by composers unable to hold their nerve quite as well as Ashley. As with all her works, a sense of intuitive, instinctive alchemy is at the core of Lost In Shadows, as Ashley's jarring tonal juxtapositions and her own elusive vocals act out a metaphor for the challenge of nurturing new relationships in testing circumstances, an experience she describes as "many hours spent awake at night in a dream like state of half consciousness, darkness and solitude; an overwhelming feeling of loneliness and exhaustion made light by a profound new love." Ultimately, the results are cranky as much as delirious, uncannily relaying a state of mind and sensations which will only ever be felt by some of its potential listeners yet offers myriad possibilities for interpretation to all. Artwork by Gayle Paul.
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CD
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IMPREC 413CD
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Ashley Paul's Heat Source was recorded during a challenging year of transience between New York and London. During this year of impermanence Paul performed regularly and the effects of frequent performance and traveling can be heard in the intentionally pared-back emptiness of Heat Source, making it an emotionally challenging and fascinatingly personal listening experience. Heat Source finds Ashley Paul working using her brilliant ears to find a zen like balance between her voice and a sparse arrangement of staccato instrumentation leaving as much open space on one song as most people would create in a lifetime. This open space isn't empty, however, but it's up to you to fill in the meaning. Heat Source is an emotionally challenging and fascinatingly personal listening experience that creates a powerful pace. Ashley Paul is a performer and composer based in Brooklyn, New York. She uses an array of instruments including saxophone, clarinet, voice, guitar, bells and percussion, mixing disparate elements to create a colorful palate of sound that works its way into her intuitive songs; free-forming, introverted melodies. This blend manifests beautiful and simple musical forms against acoustic experimentation. Her solo albums have received high praise, being chosen in Wire Magazine's "Top 50 Releases of 2013, Pitchfork's "Best Experimental sounds of 2013," first on Byron Coley and Thurston Moore's "Tongue Top Ten" in Arthur Magazine and included on NPR's All Songs Considered "Best of 2010." She has been interviewed or featured in Wire Magazine, BOMB, Gonzo (circus), Dummy, The Quietus, Ad Hoc, Spex, The Sound Projector and Foxy Digitalis. Ashley has performed or recorded with Phill Niblock, Rashad Becker, Nik Colk Void, Loren Connors, Aki Onda, C. Spencer Yeh, Anthony Coleman, Joe Maneri, Joe Morris, Seijiro Murayama, Greg Kelley, Bill Nace and Eli Keszler, appearing on such labels as PAN, ESP-DISK' and Tzadik. She received a Masters of Music from New England Conservatory in 2007.
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Cassette
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SAUNA 021CS
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White Night is a contemplative new collection of pieces from Ashley Paul. Using prepared guitar, green box, voice and reeds; her unique style lies somewhere between song, space, and dissonance, leaving the listener haunted in its closure. This cassette was recorded over the course of a year in four cities; Brooklyn, Boston, London and Orlando. Features contributions on two tracks from artists Eli Keszler (percussion) and Greg Kelley (trumpet).
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