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LP
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FTR 400LP
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"... When I first met Chris, Jess and Dan, they were all living in Western MA and I was in Eastern MA. And when they recorded this album in the Pacific Northwest, I had just moved to the Pacific Northwest. Though Chris and Jess had lived and created music in the Bay Area and Portland, Maine prior to their tenure in Western MA and have since moved back to the Bay Area, their music (Fat Worm of Error, Angst Hase Pfeffer Nase, Schurt Kwitters, White Limo) came to define certain aspects of the Western MA 'noise' scene of the late '90s/early aughts... while Dan Greenwood's music as Diagram A came to define an almost photonegative of these qualities, sharing some of the absurdity, conceptualism and instability with an added intensity, viscerality and violence . . . Once in Washington, they recorded multiple sessions of Chris' floortop guitar and electronics, a guitar Dan had modified with motors and springs, Dan's homemade cracked electronic circuitry, and one of Seattle instrument builder Dave Knott's stringboards. Combined with these were recordings made in and around Port Townsend's historic, decaying military installation at Fort Worden State Park, including recordings in Fort Worden's legendary two-million-gallon cistern, which has a dizzying 45 seconds of natural reverb. The cistern is well known as being the recording site of the very first Deep Listening Band album by Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis, released in 1989. Chris, Jess & Dan brought down an analog synth, a clarinet, a Marantz tape recorder (and some tapes) and wandered throughout the cistern's roughly 200-foot diameter. Side one begins and ends with a heavy emphasis on skittery, sometimes abrasive, anxiously controlled electronics, particularly the idiosyncratic sound of Dan's crackling devices. Things become more mechanistic and open before offering a glimpse of the cistern recordings which will come to dominate side two, but the side closes out with more sonic steel wool. This serves to highlight the spaciousness of side two. The group utilizes the unique acoustic properties of the cistern to great effect, allowing the sounds to activate the space's resonance and then step aside. Amidst this Gothic cathedral of reverberating tones are delicately interwoven recordings of trains and thistly electronics creating a palpable foreground and background . . ." --Greg Kelley, Seattle WA, 11:11pm, 11/11/18
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