‘resonant embers’ is a compilation CD featuring Paul Bradley, Maile Colbert, irr. app. (ext.), jgrzinich, Andrew Liles, Colin Potter and Ubeboet who have all previously been released through our parent label Twenty Hertz.

Here we have seven artists presenting seven tracks of drones both stoically austere and uplifting melodic, haunting melodies, beautifully evocative vocals, engaging field recordings and disorientating environments.

There are many things that link these artists together but it is their differences that are more interesting. There is a fundamental contrast in approach and execution with each channeling their creativity in differing ways from drones and soundscapes, through melodic instrumental pieces to environmental recordings and opera. The artists presented here have created individual works that display a unique voice and emotion, all the while creating a collectively involving work that is rewarded with repeated listens.

‘edition sonoro’ are very pleased and indeed darn right proud to be bringing these artists together on ‘resonant embers’ and hope that listeners will enjoy the unique and emotional journey they have created.

Track listing:
1. irr. app. (ext.) – Whickering mechanical parapropalaehoplophorus
2. jgrzinich – Animate structures No.1
3. Ubeboet – Agone
4. Colin Potter – Bella (direct current)
5. Paul Bradley – Kaleidoscope
6. Maile Colbert with Tellemake – Day of Anger act five; A fluid dawn
7. Andrew Liles – The relentlessly banal landscape

Copies are £10 plus postage available from www.editionsonoro.com or www.twentyhertz.co.uk

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Reviews:

AUDIO VERITÉ

Resonant Embers compiles Paul Bradley and accomplices previously released through parent label, Twenty Hertz. Seven artists linked by a shared aesthetic (let’s call it “experimental”) with differing takes: a harder outside of sound art and austere ambience with a soft centre of post-Romanticist melodic drones.

First up, NWW collaborator, Matthew Waldron, re-cranks his irr. app. (ext.) vehicle for an discomfiting drive fuelled by a wierd mixture of dissonant effluvia. Inside “Whickering Mechanical Parapropalaehoplophorus” a slowly modulating sound hovers behind an up-close rattle and hum. Twisted moans and a buzz rendered with slapback echo (airplanes? Insect buzz?) infest the sound field. There ensues a woozy stagger attended by an ineffable feeling of fascinated discomfort. There are more corroded metal shapes and post-Industrial wastelands on “Animate structures No.1″, over which environmental collagist jgrzinich scatters a windblown array of field recordings of high tension wires and rummagings from the blasted post-Soviet heath of his adoptive Estonia. His piece sounds less like electronic music than the inarticulate speech of nature’s dark heart.

More palatable musical soundscapery comes from Miguel Tolosa and project manager Bradley. Tolosa’s project Ubeboet offers in “Agone” an ecstasy of haunting ethereality, smartly smudged. Strings at a remove and sub-aqueous operatics whisper forth from within a carpet of delicate pads, a euphonic shimmer of drone guilded by a ghost violin. Tone-poetry in motion. The unjustly unsung Bradley seems lately to have gradually removed the acousmatic veils from his sounds to reveal their guitar-generated nature. He spools out an electraglide in blue of weaving guitar strata not far removed from Aidan Baker, current doyenne of drone-guitarscapism. “Kaleidoscope” is admittedly more synthetic, less gritty, but still imbued with textural detail cycling across the stereofield, further tones being twirled into a mix of pristine steel lightly blurred at the edges. In between, veteran Colin Potter in “Bella (direct current)” alchemises liquid drones from base metal (bells, actually), sounds swelling and relenting, hypnotically heaving. Bradley protegé, Maile Colbert, and mysterious accomplice Tellemake, spins her voice through a series of looping devices and VLF recordings, in a style somewhere twixt a less woozed-up Grouper and a more corporeal version of the vox-spectres from Akira Rabelais’ Spellewauerynsherde.

A mournful closure comes via doleful occasional black humorist, Andrew Liles, who plays it straight here; the breathy lilt of a violin steeped in Balkan noir emerges from some doom-laden low end-of-pianisms to unravel through ominous tolling. Liles’ “The Relentlessly Banal Landscape” strikes as a rather spare and sad affair, and fails to sound the right endnote for what proves to be a curate’s egg of a collection.
- ALAN LOCKETT, e/i magazine

CD edition sonoro , England (2007)

. pebble and star [11:06]
.. bounds and magnitudes [30:00]
… stimulus and resolve [18:45]

rudiment of two sample

info

”rudiment of two’ contains three extended compositions based on an array of sound material recorded in 2006 in Estonia, Italy, Portugal, Japan and Finland. Acoustic sounds from various objects, materials, improvisations and field recordings were processed to varying degrees and woven together to form spatial interplay of delicate textures and tonalities. The CD package was designed by myself and features imagery from a series unique photos and photographic collages.

Special thanks to the following people who helped make this work possible:
Paulo, Evelyn, Paul, Antonio, Koz and Patrick.
Collaborative material with Patrick McGinley appears on track 2.
Lau, Antti, Patrick and Koz appear on the intro to track 3.

reviews

Currently living in Estonia, the American sound artist John Grzinich, aka jgrzinich, conducts extraordinary alchemical investigations, rendering acoustic sounds as mercurial abstractions. While he operates in the long form theatre of the drone, each of his recordings – in particular his most recent offering Rudiment of Two – expresses subtle yet rich complexities, penetrating the limits of the form. He begins with field recordings – rain, water and wind seem the likely culprits – and the sounds of objects being agitated (a photograph of ornately bulbous glass vases points to such an item). Out of these Grzinich extracts slippery frequencies which undulate into graceful sweeps before plunging into numbingly cold passages of nocturnal ambience. Punctuated by the use of original sound sources, often in repeating cycles at lengthy intervals, the elongated timbres engage in a slow motion tumble. The results are anything but static, a spellbinding dislocations of time and space not unlike that of Richard Chartier or Jonathan Coleclough.
- Jim Haynes, THE WIRE

In the year of the mournful spirit, that stage during which the hearts of men are deceived, and the ritual house sweeping is enacted as a remedy, time solidifies and assumes the form once occupied by the actual object. The compositions on Rudiment Of Two breathe in this solidified substance of time, that is, the memories, manner, and moods encrusted onto various everyday objects, becoming hypnotized and binding its enjoyment to certain patterns and symbolic formations. In rearranging the electroacoustic vapors and squeaky balloon tones into a narrative, a temporal succession that searches for and simultaneously shields itself from any recognition of primal origins, John Grzinich gentrifies them, but doesn’t yield absolute control, and merely creates a minimum positive consistency through which a slow rotation of events is able to radiate with aplomb. Post-production techniques enable sound sources to shine rather than overwhelm, and interact, however chaotically, rather than embrace one another in a promiscuous confusion. “Pebble And Star” is impeccably guided, its quasi-industrial prismatic refractions and subharmonic pulses are embedded in a variety of contexts, in different relations to the elements which make up the ever-shifting network, each affording the other a specific yet, owing to accumulation, well-rounded identity. The textures of “Stimulus And Resolve,” spun from field recordings gathered in Estonia, Topolo, Lisbon, and Nodar, are complemented with a restless foreground of spindly warbling and scattershot frequencies, erecting, in the process, a tenuous, colossal architecture. At 30 minutes, “Bounds And Magnitudes” begins with luminous single tones that swell on the horizon like pregnant suns. The long oscillating currents are sent deeper and deeper into the bowels of the room, turning the naturally occurring acoustic phenomena into accompanists. The objects soon take on their own aesthetic, branching out on their own while also keeping up with rather than entirely giving into the complex feedback from Grzinich. What ensues is a sustained clammer of perturbed rapture that Grzinich balances right on the edge of instability. In opening these works up as such, he tests the flexibility and usability of his own language, and it holds up rather well in most places.
- MS http://ei-mag.com

RATED: 8,8 / 10
To my surprise John Grzinich has not been reviewed at EARLabs till now, although he had several releases, being more than worth getting attention…
> read more from Sascha Renner at earlabs.org

An unsettling sense of duality: Each sound creates an image, stirrs a memory, triggers a reflex… John Grzinich wants you to listen. That may not seem like big news – don’t all artists, after all? There is a subtle difference between Grzinich’s request and the feverish urge to grab some attention, however.
> read more from Tobias Fischer at Tokafi

The materialization of new forms of aural beauty through means of expression that many artists have already exploited, often abusing of them – not a rare occurrence in this field – is what John Grzinich achieves in most everything he releases, “Rudiment of two” being another brilliant outing that celebrates the wedding between processed acoustic sources and massive effects on the receivers. Three tracks, whose length ranges from 11 to 30 minutes, show what Grzinich is capable of doing through a careful selection of frequencies extracted from sounds that he captured in Estonia, Italy, Portugal and Japan, nuances that he subsequently proceeded to edit in his studio. The longest piece “Bounds and magnitudes” is also the most emotionally charged, a steady growth of wavering resonances acting as a memory generator for the brain, which treats these images as backward photographs of our self-doubt while furnishing us with the necessary nervous strength to accept any consequence deriving from indecision. “Stimulus and resolve” is slightly more active-listening oriented, its fixed background flow interspersed with metallic intrusions, gamelan-like patterns and sudden dynamic changes. “Pebble and star” raises clouds of upper partial-derived timbral ambiguities and fuses them in a slow underground pulse, linking the American’s sound with unfathomable realities that still border with the “industrial” in terms of sonority. Yet, just like willing to add a dose of security to the overall feel, Grzinich makes use of water sounds throughout; one of the purest elements (despite the modifications) is perceived amidst complex interchanges between the being and the space surrounding it, put in vibration through mechanisms that one can only guess but never really grasp. Here lies this music’s most intriguing aspect, which also highlights its composer’s talent.
Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes

old glass wine jars used for recording sessions in Italy