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LP
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FAITICHE 020LP
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2021 repress. Faitiche presents a new album by Andrew Pekler: Sounds From Phantom Islands brings together ten tracks created over the last three years for the interactive website Phantom Islands - A Sonic Atlas. With his 2016 album Tristes Tropiques (FAITICHE 014LP, 2016), Pekler created a highly unique cosmos of ethnographic sound speculations. Sounds From Phantom Islands continues and simultaneously expands this concept: finely elaborated chordal motifs float like fog over fictional maritime landscapes. A masterpiece of contemporary exotica. Phantom islands are islands that appeared on historical maps but never actually existed. The status of these artifacts of European colonial expansion from the 15th to the 19th century oscillates between cartographic fact and maritime fiction. Sounds From Phantom Islands interprets and presents these imaginations as a quasi-ethnographic catalog of music and synthetic field recordings. The pieces on this album are based on recordings made for Phantom Islands - A Sonic Atlas, an online interactive map developed with cultural anthropologist Stefanie Kiwi Menrath. Includes download code.
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LP
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FAITICHE 014LP
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2021 repress. Faitiche welcomes back Andrew Pekler, the musical director of the 2011 album Sonne = Blackbox (FAITICHE 005CD) featuring Ursula Bogner. Andrew Pekler's Tristes Tropiques is an album of synthetic exotica, pseudo-ethnographic music and unreal field recordings. Jan Jelinek interviews Andrew Pekler about Tristes Tropiques:
JJ: You've titled your album Tristes Tropiques - a reference to Claude Lévi-Strauss's famous account of his travels among native peoples in the Mato Grosso. If I remember correctly, the book can be read in two ways: as an ethnographic study of indigenous Brazilian tribes, and as a critique of anthropological methods. What exactly about Tristes Tropiques inspired you? The melancholy travelogue, or the formation of a new, critical school of thought?
AP: Both. Lévi-Strauss's constant reflection on the purpose of his work and the often melancholy tone of his writing constitute an internal tension which runs throughout the whole book. Tristes Tropiques is many things; autobiography, traveler's tale, ethnographic report, philosophical treatise, colonial history. But ultimately, it's the author's attempt to synthesize meaning from fragments of his own and other cultures that resonated most strongly with me - and led me to a new perspective on how I hear and make music.
JJ: Listening to Tristes Tropiques I noticed a certain oscillation between references, which is what I really like about it. Obviously, your music alludes to the beloved fairytale kitsch of exotica, but it also repeatedly shifts to a mode of ethno-poetic meditation music that seems to have no beginning or end. Where do you yourself locate the tracks gathered here?
AP: As a listener and as a musician, exotica music of the 1950s and '60s has always been a constant reference point and inspiration. And perhaps my listening has been "ruined" by exotica, but as I have dug deeper into ethnographic archives of "traditional" music, I've come to the realization that all recordings that evoke, allude to, or ostensibly document other musical forms have a similar effect on my imagination: I am most intrigued when I perceive some coincidentally familiar element within the foreign (a tuned percussion recital from Malawi that immediately brings to mind Steve Reichian minimalism, or the Burundian female vocal duet that sounds uncannily like a cut-up tape experiment, etc.). I suppose this album is an attempt to recreate the same kind of listening experience as what I've described, just with the electronic means that I have at hand.
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LP
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MUSCUT 004LP
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First vinyl edition of Andrew Pekler's Cue, originally released as a CD by Kranky in 2007. Reissued by the Kiev, Ukraine-based Muscut label (founded by Dmytro Nikolaienko) under exclusive license from Kranky, Ltd. Limited edition of 300. From Andrew Pekler: "Typically, library music albums were not available to the general public but were marketed directly to film, TV and commercial production companies. Judging by the information provided on the record sleeves, these consumers of library music were assumed to have little interest in the identities of the individuals who actually wrote and played the music, the musicians' names often being relegated to the very small print. Instead, it appears that the functional aspects of the product were of foremost importance; the persistently generic names of the tracks and their descriptions, durations and suggestions for their usage are the ubiquitous features of library album packaging. At the same time, the name of the production studio itself is given the kind of front cover top-billing usually reserved for a performer or composer (or to brand names on boxes of corn flakes)."
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CD
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KRANK 109CD
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"From Andrew Pekler: 'Typically, library music albums were not available to the general public but were marketed directly to film, TV and commercial production companies. With this in mind, Andrew Pekler conceived and produced Cue. Starting from short expository phrases setting forth a track's instrumentation, mood and development (reproduced on the back cover), Pekler attempted to construct pieces to fit these specific criteria. During the process of assembly, a track would more often than not evolve beyond its prescribed limits (in these cases, the descriptive blurbs have been updated to reflect the changes). This 'dog walking man' method turned out to be a fertile middle ground between the micro-managed jazz miniatures of Nocturnes, False Dawns & Breakdowns (2004) and the expansive improvisations of Strings + Feedback (2005) and may help to explain why Cue sounds very little like its predecessors. On the whole, it is a vibrant, playful album with the occasional somber passage providing some contrast to the predominantly ebullient tone. Piano and analog synthesizer sounds abound while percussion (when used) is typically reduced to a minimum of tom toms, bells and unidentified noises. Feedback can be heard in almost every track but taking on more subtle textural roles, guitars get the occasional spotlight and men are wearing pastels again this spring. It should be noted that Cue is not an attempt to re-create, re-imagine or re-contextualize library music of past eras. It is not a post-modern exercise in citation, juxtaposition or collage. The attempt to re-create the 'style' of library music would be pointless anyway as the music found on library records does not adhere to any distinct stylistic or aesthetic formula. Instead, library music can be defined by the formal constraints pertaining to its mode of production and it is the appropriation and application of these same constraints that have enabled and inspired Andrew Pekler to produce the music for this album."
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CD
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STAUB 062CD
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California-transplant to Berlin Andrew Pekler's third full-length and first release on Staubgold. On his two previous albums (released on the Scape label) Pekler led his listeners on a random walk through the clear and mysterious air of a metropolis at midnight. There he met with a form of jazz one may be familiar with from French films of the 1950s. He picked up this music's narrative and re-told it to the listener by adding a lively tinge of digital contrasts. Those two albums may be taken as necessary starting points for him to arrive at Strings + Feedback. The ten tracks on this new album embark on an excursion into the direct vicinity of sounds and into the inner life of the mixing desk. It is here where sounds are organized, where they all must pass through, that Pekler develops his breathtaking signal flow. Inside his mixing console, Pekler forces a conversation between a few string and piano samples (taken mostly from Morton Feldman's work in the 1950s), forcing unpredictable encounters, intensification and distortion. If Pekler on his previous albums appeared as a minute observer who knows how to describe even the most delicate atmospheric conditions through music, then on Strings + Feedback he has become an intermediary between sound worlds. Similar to the imaginary circuit diagram on the album's cover, Pekler's pieces leave the safe and beaten tracks on which most specialists tread and instead create open-ended and yet-to-be-discovered paths which cannot be described through the logic of a manual. It may be unintentional that the cover design is reminiscent of the 1960s Situationist's visionary city maps, but it matches Pekler's approach as he creates a new topography by re-organizing existing sound material. In the words of Yoko Ono: "Draw a map to get lost."
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LP
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STAUB 062LP
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