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viewing 1 To 7 of 7 items
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CD
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HEMK 032CD
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For her follow-up album to 2012's Commotus (HEM 019CD/LP), Lucrecia Dalt treats listeners to a perilously brief, intricately conceived meditation. At times rich and cinematic, and at other times, delicate and fragile, Syzygy is a journey into a kind of Ursprung of beautiful distress. Another stylistic leap for Dalt, Syzygy eschews her quietly textured, bass-guitar-driven method of song craft for a more direct approach to production. Syzygy furthers her previous album's raison d'être, being never simply easy to get, but never forbidding or inaccessible. Composed in a whirling interstitial moment between Barcelona and her recent relocation to Berlin, Syzygy brims with uncertainty and suspense. Fluttering arpeggios, unexpected bursts of tone, surrealistic tropical interludes, and deep, contrapuntal sub-bass drones are the language of Syzygy. It's hard not to make a comparison to the zoo of elementary particles, or a space age sound library; Except the album advances forward with such inexorable cohesiveness that its brevity comes as the most electric shock of all. Dalt's trilingual vocals (Spanish, English, Catalan) ride the edge between psychological drama and philosophical reverie, swirling complex themes sourced from texts by Walter Benjamin, Italo Calvino and films by Antonioni and Bergman, into a freeform confessional fabric. Dalt let these classic films run straight through while she worked on the album, allowing the films' sudden changes of mood and tempo to push her music in new directions, as if these cinematic moments were simply stems in the mix. The end result is a listen more tempting, and yet more mystifying than ever. Syzygy encourages repeat listens and addictive contemplation, and represents Dalt's most definitive statement yet. Cover image by Tonje Thilesen.
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7"
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HEMK 020EP
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Part of Julia Holter's "Phonetic Translations" series, in which she interprets global kitsch music by translating foreign word-sounds into surreal poetry in her native tongue, English. Features side-by-side lyrics in the original Russian, and in Holter's phonetically-translated English, both printed on the vinyl's inner-sleeve. Side B holds a Roxy Music tune covered back in 2009 on KDVS radio. Includes a download code to redeem for the entire KDVS radio set in 24bit and mp3 formats. Comes on deep purple vinyl with ivory inlay.
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CD
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HEMK 028CD
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Ekkehard Ehlers' essential electronica opus sees a breathtakingly warm analog revival. Before lo-fi tape hiss and filter murk became the preferred ways of fucking up your music, all we had to rely on was the glitch. The early 2000s were the swingin' glitch years, when clicking, skipping, beat-repeat and buffer-delay seeped into every ontological stratum of music-making. But it wasn't just flashy winks teased into indie pop-dance, facile quasiclassical crossover, and bookish sound art. Glitch was a grand, sweeping sea-change in how people listened to recorded music. The idea that the act of editing was now elemental, unconcealed; that seems to be the legacy of experimental electronica's golden years. And at the heart of it all seemed to lie this curious little album by Ekkehard Ehlers, made of nothing more than mash-ups of two of the previous century's musical sea-changers, Arnold Schönberg and Charles Ives. A high concept, even for haughty times. Not exactly the stuff of poetical dreams, right? But in the decade to follow, Ehlers would become well-known for balancing the heart precariously upon the intellectual sword. In his follow-up to Betrieb, the Ekkehard Ehlers Plays series, the mere thought of Cornelius Cardew and Albert Ayler were brought to bear upon a new tradition that had yet to figure out how it felt about feeling. And as any proper first album should, Betrieb could have no better stated this mission of pitting concept against intuition. To this day, Betrieb continues to articulate the epistemology of its era, as much as it offers timeless auditory delights. HEM's 24bit remaster represents a significant update to the original sound. The original masters were transferred to 1/2" tape, and then treated to a remarkable journey through hand-wound patch cables, bespoke acoustics and humming transistors. Ehlers' music not only stands up to the analog treatment, it shines: clicks and pops have become fuzzy, glowing points of starlight, while once-foggy atmospherics have become layered, multidimensional skeins of strings and smoke. Betrieb was once the thinking-man's feeling-music (or the feeling-man's thinking-music). But it is now, simply, a transportive listening experience: finally the monument it always aimed to be.
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CD
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HEMK 026CD
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The long-awaited, groundbreaking, pop album by acclaimed composer Michael Pisaro. Featuring Julia Holter, Tashi Wada, Cassia Streb and Rob Esler. "Voice: soft, pure (no vibrato), more like folk or pop singing than lieder singing." -- from the book of scores. "I began writing these pieces with a question in mind: what happens to old political songs?" -- Michael Pisaro, 2011. Tombstones reconstitutes the ghost of the voice. Slipping down the inexorable mountain-slope of tones in "New Orleans," or bearing mute witness to the dark octaves that loom over Julia Holter's delicate vocal on "Silent Cloud," you get the feeling that Tombstones, like Pierre Klossowski's viscous, spinning Baphomet, wants to draw all histories out into the open, and to make them speak. MP: "The tombstones take tiny fragments of old and not-so-old songs and put them into an experimental music situation, introducing them to a kind of chaos, where the arrangement of the written-out material is up for grabs." Each "tombstone," as these tracks are called, is literally a "sampled" bit of structure, tuning, lyricism, beat, or phrasing; a mystery moment sourced from perhaps, The Beatles, DJ Screw, Bob Dylan, and UGK, to name a few. MP: "I selected performances with this question in mind: did the song happen?" Pisaro boils the archetype of sampling down to a fragment of intention, the groundwork of a sound, at once beyond the reach, and at the origin of the act of editing. In other words, it's the knowledge-seeker's paradox in music. While it is not possible to know all there is in creation, it is quite possible to distill the elegant, simple processes at its heart. In the band, electronics are conspicuously absent (but not forbidden). Two electric guitars (played by Grier and Pisaro) appear. Otherwise, Tombstones relies on a rather economical spread of acoustic instruments and percussion, some conventional, some not-so-conventional. The pulsating drones of harmonium (Tashi Wada, Julia Holter) and e-bow guitar anchor the field with unwavering strings (Cassia Streb, Laura Steenberge) and flute (Kelly Coats) performed without a hint of vibrato. Percussionist Rob Esler offers a surprising range of naturalistic (sometimes eerily synthesizer-like) performances that aim for halo more than punctuation. Vocalists Janet Kim, Julia Holter, Laura Steenberge, and Lisa Tolentino each approach their performances in unique ways. Pisaro's composition technique preserves the experimental situation within a realm of trust and wonder. On "Fool," we have one impossibly protracted line from the hook to UGK's rap ballad "One Day." But a closer look at the score reveals not an act of dissection, nor a state of chance, but a state of trust. The ensemble must feel out for how long to make a sound. They must choose, upon instinct, when to start and when to stop. Pisaro offers only just-so-many-notes, or just-so-few dynamic markings, like a blind descent.
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LP
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HEMK 026LP
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LP version. Comes on milky clear vinyl with grey splatter, housed in a gatefold sleeve. The long-awaited, groundbreaking, pop album by acclaimed composer Michael Pisaro. Featuring Julia Holter, Tashi Wada, Cassia Streb and Rob Esler. "Voice: soft, pure (no vibrato), more like folk or pop singing than lieder singing." -- from the book of scores. "I began writing these pieces with a question in mind: what happens to old political songs?" -- Michael Pisaro, 2011. Tombstones reconstitutes the ghost of the voice. Slipping down the inexorable mountain-slope of tones in "New Orleans," or bearing mute witness to the dark octaves that loom over Julia Holter's delicate vocal on "Silent Cloud," you get the feeling that Tombstones, like Pierre Klossowski's viscous, spinning Baphomet, wants to draw all histories out into the open, and to make them speak. MP: "The tombstones take tiny fragments of old and not-so-old songs and put them into an experimental music situation, introducing them to a kind of chaos, where the arrangement of the written-out material is up for grabs." Each "tombstone," as these tracks are called, is literally a "sampled" bit of structure, tuning, lyricism, beat, or phrasing; a mystery moment sourced from perhaps, The Beatles, DJ Screw, Bob Dylan, and UGK, to name a few. MP: "I selected performances with this question in mind: did the song happen?" Pisaro boils the archetype of sampling down to a fragment of intention, the groundwork of a sound, at once beyond the reach, and at the origin of the act of editing. In other words, it's the knowledge-seeker's paradox in music. While it is not possible to know all there is in creation, it is quite possible to distill the elegant, simple processes at its heart. In the band, electronics are conspicuously absent (but not forbidden). Two electric guitars (played by Grier and Pisaro) appear. Otherwise, Tombstones relies on a rather economical spread of acoustic instruments and percussion, some conventional, some not-so-conventional. The pulsating drones of harmonium (Tashi Wada, Julia Holter) and e-bow guitar anchor the field with unwavering strings (Cassia Streb, Laura Steenberge) and flute (Kelly Coats) performed without a hint of vibrato. Percussionist Rob Esler offers a surprising range of naturalistic (sometimes eerily synthesizer-like) performances that aim for halo more than punctuation. Vocalists Janet Kim, Julia Holter, Laura Steenberge, and Lisa Tolentino each approach their performances in unique ways. Pisaro's composition technique preserves the experimental situation within a realm of trust and wonder. On "Fool," we have one impossibly protracted line from the hook to UGK's rap ballad "One Day." But a closer look at the score reveals not an act of dissection, nor a state of chance, but a state of trust. The ensemble must feel out for how long to make a sound. They must choose, upon instinct, when to start and when to stop. Pisaro offers only just-so-many-notes, or just-so-few dynamic markings, like a blind descent.
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CD
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HEMK 024CD
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HEM leader Jason Grier's own experimental pop-funk, featuring Julia Holter and Lucrecia Dalt. Clouds is a little novella of an album; a sphinx-like meditation on fate, circumstance and the oddities of being a perpetual traveller. Fittingly, it was recorded in three years and three cities; between 2009 and 2011 in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Berlin. Grier carried the drafts around like a travelogue, and the resulting compositions read like an accumulation of curiously juxtaposed sounds and notes-to-self about the fickle nature of fate. Using deconstructions of private-press bedroom soul music as a skeleton, Grier fleshed out nods to kosmiche, '70s Eno, Janet Jackson, and Jodeci, Terry Riley, drone music, Renaissance organ music, and medieval composers like Petrus de Cruce and Josquin des Prez. He first crafted an original set of grooves, then deleted beats and notes until just-so-little of the original syncopation could be felt. In the resulting void, he sought out hovering musicologies emerging like clouds in tension with nothingness. In "Karma," the gorgeously sparse duet with Julia Holter, the void is filled by one of the album's many field recordings, sourced from a badly-scratched "soothing sounds of nature" record picked up along the way in a San Francisco thrift store. The vinyl hiss creates a double-irony, but more importantly serves as a kind of "springtime mist" where the tensions nothing/something, sure/unsure, and I-love-you/I-love-you-not come in and out of focus. Grier composed the vocals following a medieval technique called "hocket," where a single melody is traded between performers. The result is a love poem that may or may not belong to the same heart, that may be spoken by indifferent voices, or by two people of one mind. Contrast this to the title-track, where bubbling, fizzing energy propels a sardonic exchange between a hapless dreamer (Grier) and a hip stoner (portrayed by Lucrecia Dalt). The dreamer can never convince her that doing what comes natural is extraordinary. But ultimately, both agree "that all you really ever need is in the sky" -- be it a sky filled with dreams or smoke. Between "Karma" and "Clouds" sits ecclesiastical funk ballad, "The Rules." Here Grier claims that fate isn't our maker; it's just a hitchhiker riding our lives to some far off place. The song's A-B-A structure, with a deadpan verse repeat after four minutes of tantric build-up, echoes its theme of eternal return. This probably best sums up the movement of Clouds. We get nervous peering at the void (which is always the true form of "what comes next") even though we're certain to encounter something familiar. You keep meeting the same souls over and over again. And it's quite nice.
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CD
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HEM 019CD
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At the beginning of history, Ariel Pink once said "all the best shit's made when you're alone." But how far did he imagine this edict could be taken beyond the psychedelic and into the realm of the purely personal? Today, we seem to have two branches in the school of experimental pop. One branch privileges object-hood, richness of surface, and mass-hallucinatory quotation. The other (much less celebrated) branch seeks to recapture authenticity in the form of a highly personal hallucination of music history. With her sophomore full-length, Lucrecia Dalt follows the latter branch as far as it seems to go. She leaps into a surrealist landscape with stunning abandon, eschewing the comparatively safe tropes and song structures of her previous work. And she charts a surprisingly inventive and rewarding territory in the process. Much as it is with her newfound contemporaries at HEM Berlin, for Dalt, solitude and assemblage (of sound, genre, musicology, technique) is an exploratory zone steered toward the inner universe. To follow the music, one must be prepared to make this trip as real as sound itself. Themes of agitation and disturbance, cumulative, impending and scalable, propel Commotus, and create a framework for understanding its emotional spectra. The music lives in the contradiction between having time to reflect on the inevitable, and the irrevocability of its outcome. Dalt, who is a civil engineer with a specialty in geotechnics, knows that motion on a geologic time scale can be the most poignant analogy to the interminable struggle between self-awareness and sea change. Dalt has established herself as a solo performer, building songs live and in recordings using pedals, laptop, and loops. She's even been seen with a touch-screen strapped to the wings of her electric bass. So it's all the more surprising that, throughout Commotus, she works with an enormous, and enormously subtle, sound palette, almost completely triggered from solo bass. (Two notable exceptions being guest appearances from Luke Sutherland and Julia Holter.) Some of these sounds are as concrete as a timpani shot, or the snap of an analog rhythm box. But the majority of sounds exist in a nether-world between evocation and pure abstraction. This is rife terrain for self-expression, and dramatic tension, with a result made all the more poignant because she's playing alone. In Commotus, you can hear every sound-event becoming the curled-up dimensions of a richly personal experience.
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