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Anthelion [Complete 2008 Sessions]

by Brian Grainger

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about

In 2008, I embarked on four different recording sessions with the intent to create music that was equal parts field recording and elemental improvisations on instruments that were textured and prepared in such a way that they wouldn't be thought of in musical terms. In hindsight, I don't think I quite got to where I was wanting to go, as the Anthelion recordings still lack a complete synergy between the instrumental parts and the atmospheric parts, but somewhere in there I think I found a good combination of sound design despite that.

Until now, these releases have remained out of print, and were issued on low print runs to begin with (I think White/Night Anthelion were around twenty copies each), and existed only in the bodiless digital realm here on the web. The decision was also made to reissue these recordings without any remastering work, even though I think certain parts of their recording processes were done quite crudely compared to how I might approach the same work now. This is because there is a surrealism about these pieces, the placement of all of the elements feels...off...in certain moments, and I would like to preserve the outright oddness of these recordings as much as possible. The only editing that was done was to reassemble the individual pieces on White & Night Anthelion into singular longform pieces, as they were originally recorded.

Musically, you might wonder what's going on within these tracks, then? White Anthelion was inspired by the sub-bass droning of Sunn O))), Oren Ambarchi and Shinobu Nemoto's underappreciated Elephant Talks album (see: moufurokuon.bandcamp.com/album/elephant-talks ). It is four extended suites of live sub-bass sequencer improvisation set over an airy bed of wind and chimes, recorded on the front porch outside my Rolling Knoll studio window. At times darker and dronier, and others more melodic and ambient, White Anthelion feels almost as if it exists only in the periphery of your listening, occupying only very low and mostly high frequency bands, only the occasional plink of a wooden wind chime coming in and out of the midrange. The rest of it is a body of air, pushed through the subtropical south where I lived at that time.

Night Anthelion came about as a reprocessing of the White Anthelion recordings, intended as a mutation of the same idea, set against a nighttime backdrop instead of a sunny daytime one. Somewhere, the original plucked bass notes were melted down into a ring-modulated fuzzed out hum, shuddering and whirring in a cricket-sung backyard. The tonal aspects of Night Anthelion more resemble a generator or engine of some kind, rumbling in the weedy space between suburban housing. Chimes are once again present as a backdrop, this time metallic ones, recorded at Foxhill and layered four times over themselves via a four-track tape recorder, further out in the country than my Rolling Knoll studio was. I may not have known it consciously at that time, but Night Anthelion played into my interests in appliance hums and the shimmering drones that can come from a lawnmower, refrigerator or air conditioning unit. These days, I am always in pursuit of exploring the differences in noise and vibration between these things, and have devoted more singular recordings to such sounds, like Naked Sound Seventeen and Eighteen.

After these first two sessions were completed and released, I revisited the original idea on two shorter sessions again later that year - Red Anthelion being my first attempt at completely synthesizing a field recording, trying to create a convincing recording of a physical space, without any organic input at all. The end result was slowly generated like a lucid dream, imagining a windy grove of cherry trees swaying in a night time breeze. Black Anthelion was a much more angular affair, synthesizing a drone piece out of recordings of airplanes going by overhead, once again returning to the fascination I hold with mechanically produced drone sounds. Red and Black both inhabit somewhat opposite disciplines in their creation, but function well back to back as singular pieces of psychedelic ambient sound.

As with many of the reissue assemblies coming out of the Arboreal Digest reissue series, a Coppice Halifax excavation of the source material was drafted, and in this case, manifested as a nearly forty minute retake of the Night Anthelion recordings. Building on the original's wavering tonal tension and shadowy textures, the CH "Dusk Lion" stands as a formidable closing curtain on this surreal tableau of experimental material, and fills out a triple album set that once again reinstates these recordings for a second lifespan.

credits

released March 29, 2019

W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded at Rolling Knoll and Foxhill, 2008, except Dusk Lion, recorded at White Pillar Workshop, December 2018. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Text and design by ABM&D. This is Milieu Music number AD40, and issue #40 in the Arboreal Digest reissue catalog.

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Brian Grainger Dayton, Ohio

Drone music, warm atmosphere and textural ephemera for the working man.

I also release music as Milieu milieumusic.bandcamp.com and Coppice Halifax coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com

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