C/F 013 |
Raglani / N.N.N. Cook Split On the A side is a new track commissioned specifically for close/far recordings. Sig. to Ether Error seems to channel a distant astral oratorio. Slowly your mind’s eye is activated and begins to build its own temple. Reconciling the synthetic with the organic, Raglani coaxes a state of concord between himself and his circuitry. On the B side the primary sound source is an electronic unit, the Meridian Box, custom designed and built by Joseph Kramer. It consists of six oscillators with independent pitch controls and electrodes controlled by body resistance. Otherness Figments immediately sweeps you into its current, enveloping your body with hum and crackle. Punctuated by blasts and tears in time, jarring moments begin to smear and stretch. As you pan across your barren destination, mirages dance across the landscape. Abruptly, your Dionysian journey ends in repose.
Pro-duplication and imprinting in black ink on clear shells with gold foil liners. Edition of 200 on high bias tape. |
C/F 012 |
N.N.N. Cook I Need Some Desert In My Life I-III |
C/F 011 |
The Current Group Plateau Meridians |
C/F 010 |
N. Nolan Cook Sine Qua Non Seeking The entire album was made on my computer using soft synths and samplers in 2004. Over the course of a year I worked on it in solitude. The primary focus of the album is of personal understanding and fruition through deep listening, meditation, and reflection. A sine qua non is something that is essential or absolutely necessary. The essential in positive human thought and behavior is what I am seeking. I believe that empathy, honesty, patience, and humility are the most important archetypal concepts in humanity. They have the power to heal and prevent many of our problems. Throughout my life as a music lover and obsessive collector my favorite albums have prompted me to investigate the meanings and messages of their titles and lyrics. Because of the curiosity and inspiration they have created this has allowed me to gain some understanding of many individuals’ perspectives through their art, stories, and music. By this very natural process between creator and listener the album becomes an evocative and emotive vehicle for communication and learning. The purpose of this work is to utilize these aspects of the album as a cultural catalyst and to encourage personal reflection on what empathy, honesty, patience, and humility mean to each of us in our lives. This album is a sonic enzyme for contemplation. Purchase hard copy: |
C/F 009 |
Arroyos Untitled Purchase hard copy: |
C/F 008 |
The Current Group Live 9.1.06 Purchase hard copy: |
C/F 007 |
The Current Group Sun+Void Purchase hard copy: |
C/F 006 |
Yawn The Halcyon and The Mendicant Formally, the music is comprised of improvisatory selections taken from various recording locations. In addition to the advent of sparse collaboration, we have at times become compositionally focused on the rawness and intimacy of acoustic instrumentation. The documentation of these performances has enabled us to better understand our reactions to the spaces that we have encountered. The overall tone along with fleeting lyrics suggests ideas about resolution and objectivity, duality, cosmology, responsibility, and aural flux rather than any sort of musical virtuosity. The Halcyon and The Mendicant is ritualistic. Purchase hard copy: |
| C/F 005 |
Yawn Calyx These three "twenty-minute pieces" are solo, written compositions created to explore our interests as individuals versus our norm of group instant composition. The fixed duration as an initial objective functioned first as an equal allocation of time to use as individual composers, with regard to our average group improvisation length of one hour. Second, the timeframe sensitivity forced the compositions into temporal works not only by their explicit nature but also through the acuteness of our intentions. This time regulation undermined a completely expressionist approach to the works, which was important because the timeframe requisite pushed us to design and develop the pieces with a unified intention without cornering us into predetermined themes and emotional attributes. Calyx is an exercise in separation. Purchase hard copy: |
| C/F 004 |
Yawn Blade of Grass, Single is Mass This release is an hour long, continuous improvisation presented as an example of a live, real-time composition, free from edits and alterations. Although it is somewhat atypical of the bulk of our session recordings in general, the work has a consistent mood over its many fluctuating movements. As we are engaged in an ongoing musical dialogue with ourselves and our listeners, this is to be taken as an excerpt within our body of work, the implicit metaphor within the title, Blade of Grass Single is Mass--a documentation of the vocabulary forming as we continue to improvise together. Purchase hard copy: |
| C/F 003 |
Yawn Sap Throughout the course of 2004 we were happy to have captured so many hours of our improvised music. That winter we decided to carefully listen to those recordings and select the most interesting and/or cohesive moments. This reminded us of the extraction process that many resources go through in order to become a finished product or unified whole, if you will. We found the parallel between our sound selection process and the extraction process of tree sap to be an appropriate analogy: both procedures utilize materials created naturally, and each refines them through specific processes in order to manifest a desired outcome. In order to put the focus on the essence and the process, not just the finished product, we chose Sap as the title and named the movements after trees, tapping tools, soil levels, and sap gradients--after all, it takes forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. Likewise, all of the tracks were extracted from live, real-time takes to an eight-track with minimal alterations made for more fluid movements. Sap is excerpt appropriate. Purchase hard copy: |
| C/F 002 |
mrPunch Cold Weather Collection Purchase hard copy: |
| C/F 001 |
mrPunch The Second Purchase hard copy: |
