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BALMAT 003B-LP
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Repress. Following her debut album, I'll Look for You in Others (Past Inside the Present), Patricia Wolf joins Spain's Balmat label with See-Through, her second album. See-Through finds the Portland, Oregon musician and field recordist continuing to develop her signature style of ambient, balancing radiant soundscaping with a carefully expressive sensibility. But the album is also marked by an important difference. She wrote and recorded many of the album's songs quickly, in preparation for an August 2021 broadcast on the online radio platform 9128 Live. Excited for the opportunity to play live after more than a year of the pandemic, Wolf decided to write all new material for the event, working with a lean setup of Octatrack, Roland Synth Plus 10, Make Noise 0-Coast, and Novation Summit. She also picked up an acoustic guitar that her brother had loaned her. Though the tracks may linger on the heaviness of loss, Wolf says, "What I discovered is that a stronger archetype had grown inside me to steer my emotions and thoughts to a better place." "Wistfulness" and "Upward Swimming Fish" -- her first experiments with VST synthesizers -- balance the bittersweet embrace of melancholy with the freedom to choose happiness. "Pacific Coast Highway," the album's lone song with drums, might at first seem like an outlier. But it also signals Wolf's interest in finding a fusion between the introspection of ambient and the togetherness of beat-oriented music. "Experiencing loss and isolation is what drove me into gentler territories of sound," she says, "but I want to start making more beat-oriented music. After an extended period of loss and isolation, I'm ready to experience more joyous and social things." Listeners with keen ears might recognize the album's closing song, "Springtime in Croatia." This marks its first appearance on vinyl, and its spiritual home is undoubtedly here, at the close of See-Through. As the bookending answer to the opening "Woodland Encounter" -- another song in which field recordings play a crucial role -- it closes the circle of an album that is itself keyed to the steadily turning cycles of life.
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BALMAT 017LP
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Balmat 17 marks both a return and a new frontier. It is the second album on the label from Patricia Wolf, whose 2022 album See-Through (BALMAT 003LP) is one of the most beloved in Balmat's catalog; it also marks the first time that Wolf has turned her hand to a film soundtrack. The results are every bit as magical as fans of the Portland, Oregon, composer's music might expect. Hrafnamynd -- Icelandic for "raven film" -- is a new feature-length documentary by experimental filmmaker Edward Pack Davee. Shot on a mix of film and digital formats, and incorporating his father's Ektachrome slides from the 1970s, the autobiographical film works on multiple levels at once: a reminiscence of his childhood in Iceland, an exploration of landscape and folklore, and a documentary study of the island nation's ravens -- including a talking raven named Krummi. Wolf is the perfect artist to score such an unusual film. Mixing ambient music and field recording -- including extensive experience documenting bird song -- Wolf brings an unusually empathic perspective to her music. In the context of Hrafnamynd, her airy melodies, pensive atmospheres, and vivid textures intuitively complement the film's grainy film stock and blown-out colors. Friends for years, the two artists further bonded when Wolf asked Pack to film music videos for her songs "Woodland Encounter" (from See-Through) and "The Culmination Of" (from I'll Look For You In Others). Pack used Wolf's previously recorded music as placeholders as he began assembling a rough cut of the film, which made her a natural choice to help him complete his idiosyncratic vision with an all-new, bespoke score. But Wolf's soundtrack also indisputably stands alone as a full-length album. Largely created using the UDO Super 6 synthesizer, it features a carefully distilled palette of warm, string-like pads and darkly glistening mallets, rounded out with the very occasional introduction of nylon string guitar. Musically and stylistically, the album's 11 tracks represent both a continuation of the ruminative sound of See-Through and also an extension into new expressive modes. Few musicians, ambient or otherwise, are as skilled at balancing melody with atmosphere, or at finding ways to eke fresh at finding ways to eke fresh, surprising sounds out of an intentionally reduced toolkit. Meditative, immersive, and emotionally generous Wolf's Hrafnamynd soundtrack evokes a range of ambient classics from decades past while confidently marking out its own verdant patch of ground.
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BALMAT 003LP
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Following her debut album, I'll Look for You in Others (Past Inside the Present, 2022), Patricia Wolf joins Spain's Balmat label with See-Through, her second album. See-Through finds the Portland, Oregon musician and field recordist continuing to develop her signature style of ambient, balancing radiant soundscaping with a carefully expressive sensibility. But the new album is also marked by an important difference. Where I'll Look for You in Others was largely written in response to the death of a loved one, See-Through represents a kind of rebirth. She wrote and recorded many of the album's songs quickly, in preparation for an August 2021 broadcast on the online radio platform 9128 Live. Excited for the opportunity to play live after more than a year of the pandemic, Wolf decided to write all new material for the event, working with a lean setup of Octatrack, Roland Synth Plus 10, Make Noise 0-Coast, and Novation Summit. (In fact, Wolf was the first sound designer invited to create patches for the Summit.) She also picked up an acoustic guitar that her brother had loaned her. "Woodland Encounter", "Under a Glass Bell", "The Grotto", "The Mechanical Age", "The Flaneur", and "Psychic Sweeping" are all products of those sessions; the through line holding them together is their exploratory spirit and clarity of vision. Other songs, like "A Conversation With My Innocence", "Recalibration", and "Psychic Sweeping", wrestle with the traumas of the preceding year. Though they may linger on the heaviness of loss, Wolf says, "What I discovered is that a stronger archetype had grown inside me to steer my emotions and thoughts to a better place." Likewise, "Wistfulness" and "Upward Swimming Fish" -- her first experiments with VST synthesizers -- balance the bittersweet embrace of melancholy with the freedom to choose happiness. "Pacific Coast Highway", the album's lone song with drums, might at first seem like an outlier. But it also signals Wolf's interest in finding a fusion between the introspection of ambient and the togetherness of beat-oriented music. Listeners with keen ears might recognize the album's closing song, "Springtime in Croatia": A different mix of the song originally appeared on the 2021 digital compilation secondnature & friends Vol. II, from the Seattle label secondnature. This marks its first appearance on vinyl, however, and its spiritual home is undoubtedly here, at the close of See-Through.
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