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Fantas Variations main photo

"Fantas" is the epic opening track on Caterina Barbieri’s acclaimed 2019 release Ecstatic Computation. The original "Fantas" laid out a magical path of patterns leading the listener on a journey into the sound itself. Fantas Variations maps out eight new potentials sprung from this initial path as constructed by a diverse mix of artists lending to a wide spectrum of new works extrapolated from the original work. For this project Barbieri invited friends and long time collaborators from a variety of musical backgrounds to create a more sustainable and inclusive landscape in terms of stylistic, geographical, gender and generational balance. The results are a diverse array of approaches and instrumentation which blur the boundaries between the acoustic and electronic.

Fantas Variations embraces a platform for mutual exchange and support between like-minded artists, where active and collective re-imagination is prioritized over the traditional model of remixes, which is often strategic, functional and more passive.

Longtime friend and collaborator Kali Malone rearranged "Fantas" to a slowed-down, austere and eerie version for two organs. Evelyn Saylor created a piece for a vocal ensemble consisting of her, Lyra Pramuk, Stine Janvin and Annie Garlid, joining forces to express the choral, psychedelic and vitalistic nature of the piece. Barbieri's former guitar professor at the Conservatory in Bologna, Walter Zanetti, composes "Fantas" for electric guitar, by translating every single gesture of the original electronic piece into a personal, nuanced and detailed interpretation. Bendik Giske's reinterpretation for saxophone and voice captures the atmospheric essence of "Fantas" and its psychic meteorology. Longtime collaborator and along with Barbieri the other half of the outfit Punctum, Carlo Maria, resynthesizes "Fantas" for TR808 and MC202, bringing a more club-oriented dimension of the piece to life whilst unveiling the sonic continuum between rhythm and pitch through a sensitive timbral approach. Jay Mitta's Singeli reinterpretation of "Fantas" transpires with pitched-up percussion and turbo-fast poly-rhythmic patterns unleashing the frenetic, shifting, transformative matter within the piece to a higher plain of euphoric dance. Baseck's variation is a rave fantasia, where the prismatic trance of the original is channeled into fierce, uncompromising hardcore, whilst Kara-Lis Coverdale's take is a phantasmagoria for piano that gently, yet inexorably, captures the relentlessness chimerical qualities of the original, unveiling its spectral backbone.

More information can be found here.

: Parent Category: News & Events; Category: Buzz Bin; Published: 20 February 2021; Hits: 2388

Originally initiated for the Merzbow, Kelly Moran, Prurient USA tour (representing three generations of heavy electronics), this archival recording is finally released as Chain Reaction At Dusk.

Moran and Prurient first met in 2018 and the two bonded over an unlikely composite of piano, drone and noise synthesis (Moran from John Cage, while early Prurient tapes cut-up Erik Satie).

A leader in the realm of prepared piano, Kelly Moran quickly drew attention for her massive and seamlessly complex juxtapositions of plucked icy melodic sequences and deep sub bass compositions, culminating in a stunning 2018 LP, Ultraviolet.

With 3-tracks of continuous intertwining melodic tension, Moran continues her juxtaposition of crystalline single note attacks upon a bed of massive low end prepared drones.

Shattering genre, Moran culls from a broad palate of classical, post-minimalism, ambient and other forms to free the piano from convention pushing high and low frequencies through electronic pairing and coupling. Recorded at her home in fall 2018, Moran’s split side showcases the composer’s prepared piano treated with delays and granular synthesis over a heavy wash of droning, arpeggiating synthesizers.

Similarly, Prurient returns with a side parallax-view vocal barrage complimentary to Moran’s fractal modes. Composed at Guy Brewer's (Shifted) former Berlin studio, Fernow accessed a cache of pristine analog synthesizers and sequencers while finishing the process with Kris Lapke in New York with layers of crude telephone dictation manipulation, resulting in surrealist vocal cut-ups - and "exquisite corpse" static.

Kelly Moran speaks of her music and as movement on the psychedelic path and the interior, while Prurient's noise derives nearly exclusively from dissociative and nightmarish imaginations.

This is the meeting of psychedelia and anxiety disorder, but the opposing morphosis is ultimately one creation of "classical doom electronics."

More information can be found here.

: Parent Category: News & Events; Category: Buzz Bin; Published: 20 February 2021; Hits: 2119

Colleen is an aboundingly inventive composer and artist. For two decades, Cécile Schott as Colleen has crafted welcoming, enchanting, and bewildering music. The multi-instrumentalist and vocalist’s timeless compositions make use of carefully selected tools to mold memories into transcendent splendor. The Tunnel and the Clearing finds Schott at her most vulnerable and confident, invoking contemplative and swirling organ processed through analog electronics, steady drum machine syncopations and her distinctive voice to embody breaking through the nexus of compounding transitions. On an album centered on processing the complicated washes of emotion through tribulations and revelations Colleen presents a vision of breathless clarity.

The Tunnel and the Clearing was developed over a period of transformative change. Colleen began work on the album in 2018 only to be met with extreme fatigue from a previously undiagnosed illness that all but halted her work. The following months and years of treatment and adjustment eventually led to relocating to a new home and studio in Barcelona, which was soon followed by lockdowns and ultimately the dissolution of her longtime partnership. The impact of deep reflecting on these cumulative experiences found Schott completely reimagining her compositional practices through her enduring gift for reinvention. Schott spent months in near complete silence apart from composing and ruminating on her newfound perspective through her music. Says Schott, "Never before had I felt so profoundly the power that music has, through harmony, melody, rhythm and sound itself, to express the whole range of human emotions." The resulting seven pieces investigate the complex, at times contradictory relationship between excitement and fear, anger and understanding, struggle and triumph, all focused on a reconstruction of the self.

Colleen's albums are unified by their employment of distinct and personal instrumentation to tell their story. From albums built around music boxes or viola da gamba to albums built around electronics, her music remarkably shares a dreamlike modern quality. From the early stages of working on The Tunnel and the Clearing, Schott restricted herself to using analog electronic instruments like the Elka Drummer One, the Roland RE-201 Space Echo and Moog Grandmother synth, coupled with Yamaha organ keyboard and select Moog effects. This limited instrument selection was inspired by years of listening to Jamaican and African recordings where musicians were pushed to maximize their creativity with minimal tools. A magnitude of atmospheres are summoned from deceptively simple combinations, from the meditative pulse of "The Crossing" to the frothy cascades of title track "The Tunnel and the Clearing." Pieces like "Revelation," or the brisk-paced "Implosion-Explosion" respectively showcase the most diverse use of harmony and the most incisive application of production technique in all of Colleen's catalog. Stunningly, Colleen achieves the rich emotional intricacy and the lush density of textures on The Tunnel and the Clearing through almost entirely live performance and processing.

The detailed and affecting compositions of The Tunnel and the Clearing mirror Colleen's grappling with her own psyche. Schott elaborates "I found direct correspondences between my internal discourse, its obsessive, frantic attempts at making sense of what I could not understand, and the music I was making, with motifs functioning as questions and answers, doubts and assertions." Clicks, hums, warbles and throbs emulating our evolving internal worlds, an "emotional noise." A musical journey through the tunnel toward the clearing at its end. An ending which is also a beginning. "The clearing is what is always out there: a vast expanse of space, light and possibilities," says Schott. The Tunnel and the Clearing is a work of lucid reverence, a constellation of marvels suspended in air.

More information can be found here.

: Parent Category: News & Events; Category: Buzz Bin; Published: 13 February 2021; Hits: 2208

Sound In Silence is happy to announce the addition of Julian Ross to its roster of artists, presenting their new album Fadeaway.

Julian Ross is the ambient/post-rock duo of Ettore Di Roberto, co-founder and still member of Port-Royal, and Andrea Comotto, former bassist in a local blues band, based in Genoa, Italy. Formed in 2016, Julian Ross released their debut album Retrospective on Silent Flow netlabel in 2018, representing the meeting of two different visions of music naturally blending one into each other.

Fadeaway, Julian Ross’ second full-length album, consists of five long-form tracks with a total duration of 35 minutes. Blending layers of mesmerizing synth pads, hypnotic bass lines, loops of delicate acoustic guitar arpeggios, subtle beats, electronic glitches, lo-fi samples, field recordings and indistinct voices from various speeches, Julian Ross create a wonderful album that perfectly mixes warm ambient, gentle electronica and minimal post-rock.
Mastered by Emilio Pozzolini, also member of Port-Royal, Fadeaway is an impressive album, highly recommended for devotees of Labradford, Tim Hecker, Fennesz and of course the quieter moments of Port-Royal.

More information can be found here.

: Parent Category: News & Events; Category: Buzz Bin; Published: 01 February 2021; Hits: 2212

Sound In Silence is proud to welcome Hotel Neon to its family, presenting their new album Moments.

Hotel Neon is an ambient trio, geographically spread between Philadelphia, Baltimore and Virginia Beach, USA. Formed in 2013 as a duo by twin brothers Andrew and Michael Tasselmyer, Hotel Neon expanded into a trio when Steven Kemner joined them in 2015. To date they have released five albums on labels such as Home Normal, Fluid Audio and Archives, a 10” vinyl split with Endless Melancholy on Thesis, and a single on Past Inside The Present. They have also self-released a remix album, two tour cassettes and four singles, two of which collaborating with Slow Meadow and one with Blurstem. Hotel Neon have toured with the likes of Benoît Pioulard, Lowercase Noises, Slow Meadow, Loscil, The Sight Below, Marcus Fischer and Christopher Tignor, filling a variety of performance spaces from galleries to cathedrals with their densely layered walls of sound, while all three members have also been active either as solo artists or in groups and projects such as The Sound Of Rescue, Gray Acres, Solidarity Hymn, Mordançage and Transient Sounds.

Moments, Hotel Neon’s sixth full-length album and first for Sound In Silence, consists of seven evocative tracks with a total duration of something more than 36 minutes. Recorded in the span of just eight weeks and done remotely, Moments is definitely one of the more minimal and textural albums Hotel Neon have ever made. Proving that they avoid repeating themselves with every album, on Moments there is certainly a stronger presence of more orchestral sounds than on their previous albums. Widening their sound palette with more swelling strings, moving orchestral elements, and subtle piano melodies, along with their usual textured layers of hazy guitars, glassy drones, soothing pads and field recordings, Hotel Neon offer one of their best albums to date.
Mastered by Taylor Deupree, Moments is a truly touching masterpiece which appeals to all fans of artists such as Stars Of The Lid, Hammock and A Winged Victory For The Sullen.

More information can be found here.