NEWS

Emily A. Sprague – Water Memory / Mount Vision – 5/24/19

Emily A. Sprague’s Water Memory and Mount Vision are presented in new and vivid detail. Through sound and poetry, Emily’s craft focuses on fleeting moments of crystalline clarity and meditates on expanded lifetimes of intricate meaning-making. Memory and vision, ocean and mountains, question and answer, emotions and infinity. Sunshine, lizard, sea salt. Previously issued as small editions of self-released cassettes, Emily’s two albums have been resequenced and mastered by Taylor Deupree, each including previously unheard tracks.

A collection of reflections are visible in the mirrored structures of Water Memory andMount Vision, two chapters – two halves – each complemented by a written verse. As much about the presence in youthful experimentation as the permanence of transition and maturation, Water Memory, originally released in 2017, is the first long-form instrumental music Emily ever channeled. Mount Vision, originally released in 2018, was conceived in a smaller window of time than its predecessor, the pure residue of intense emotional build up during a period of self-healing and unguarded reflection.

Emily’s mission on this planet may be facilitating – or illuminating – the correspondence between innermost knowledge and intelligent nature, and Water Memory / Mount Vision are most certainly monumental documents along this sharing path.

Watch the video for “Your Pond,” directed by Emily, below:

Emily A. Sprague’s newly sequenced and mastered double LP and CD editions of Water Memory / Mount Vision will be available on May 24, 2019.  A limited print of Emily’s writing, Ambient Poems (2017 – 2018), will be included to the first 300 mail order customers.

On behalf of Emily A. Sprague, a portion of the proceeds from Water Memory / Mount Vision will benefit the LGBTQ Center in Kingston, NY under Come! Mend!, an initiative bridging RVNG’s work and interest supporting non-profit organizations and charities.

(The 200 limited edition ocean blue and mountain green double LPs have sold out on Bandcamp, but some are still available through the shop)
April 10, 2019

HERE004 – Lightbath + Emily A. Sprague – full/new

Now available in digital format

full/new is an expression of mutual planetary motion. Drawing a school of listeners to the floor of Commend’s relatively small interior on a late July Sunday afternoon in 2018, Emily A. Sprague and Lightbath (aka Bryan Noll) provided an hour of aqueous reflections that whispered with the trees outside on Forsyth street and tempered the activity of the surrounding island.

Mastered by Andrew Osterhoudt, full/new was originally presented as a limited run of cassettes in hand-numbered cases as part of our Commend Here series, which captures the magical moments of select Commend events. It is now available in digital format for enjoyment in the ether. 

March 29, 2019

Visible Cloaks, Yoshio Ojima & Satsuki Shibano “Anata”

A video by Spencer Doran

Visible Cloaks, Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano share “Anata,” the second offering from serenitatem, their upcoming collaborative album for the longstanding FRKWYS series. Recorded as a quartet in Tokyo at Sounduno Studios after Spencer Doran (one half of Visible cloaks, alongside Ryan Carlile) and Ojima spent months remotely exchanging sound sketches, serenitatem demonstrates a number of creative strategies. One of which, MIDI randomization, features prominently on “Anata.”

The process gave the quartet melodic lines that informed the composition and what Doran calls “randomized clouds,” or “tightly grouped notes that become smeared tonal clusters functioning more like chords in themselves.” Carlile would also feed Ojima and Shibano’s text into Wotja, a generative music software which produced a MIDI language around which the group expanded their compositions.

On “Anata, Shibano’s spoken word floats atop lulling swells of synthetic woodwinds and vocalizations. In Doran’s video, “Anata” is visualized over panoramic views of a hyper-pigmented lawn and sky.

March 28, 2019

June Chikuma – Les Archives – 03/22/2019

Les Archives, a whooping gonzo of synthesizers, samplers, drum machines, and a mysterious string quartet; composed, arranged, and produced by the elusive Japanese artist June Chikuma is out now via Freedom To Spend.

The 1986 reissue, previously released on Toru Hatano’s Picture Label as Divertimento, so many decades ago, now glows with a different purpose; one that revises the past while maintaining, and finally elevating, its hidden influence. Les Archives is the score for a movie of mistaken identity – clones redressed in a guise of the artist’s re-coding. The legitimate artifact deceives history. There is no original, but this copy is singular and complete.

Order the LP w/ accompanying 7″ or digital edition here at the shop.

March 25, 2019

Holly Herndon – PROTO – 5/10/2019

Holly Herndon operates at the nexus of technological evolution and musical euphoria.

Today, the acclaimed performer and composer reveals new single “Eternal”, a ghostly transmission inspired by ideas of eternal love through mind uploading; a modern-day vampire story.  Punctuated by grandiose orchestration and the voices of her Berlin-based vocal ensemble, the accompanying video was constructed from footage processed from the perspective of an intelligent machine, analysing and searching for a face, yearning for a connection.

Watch the video for “Eternal” below

Pre-order the LTD edition clear LP, standard LP, and CD at the shop, or pre-save / pre-order on all other platforms here

“Eternal” follows the 2018 release of Holly and Jlin’s collaborative song “Godmother (feat. Spawn)”.  The skittering track, which was created by Spawn reimagining the artworks of her ‘godmother’ Jlin in a trained model of her mother’s voice with no editing or sample trickery, was praised everywhere from NPR to The Guardian to New York Times, and elsewhere.

You can hear traces of Spawn throughout the album, developed in partnership with long time collaborator Mathew Dryhurst and ensemble developer Jules LaPlace, and even eavesdrop on the live training ceremonies conducted in Berlin, in which hundreds of people were gathered to teach Spawn how to identify and reinterpret unfamiliar sounds in group call-and-response singing sessions; a contemporary update on the religious gathering Holly was raised amongst in her upbringing in East Tennessee.

March 11, 2019