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Diamond Tears On Slate [Expanded Reissue]

by Brian Grainger

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Pagan Horn 22:10
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about

With the arrival of Autumn, and especially this Autumn, signaling the end of a long and arduous Summer, it has not yet felt more appropriate to reinstate the brother-sister albums Diamond Tears On Slate and White Kingdoms, two monoliths of opposing textures and tonalities, intended as gatekeepers flanking the left and right sides of some great abyssal threshold. Diamond Tears On Slate, as the name implies, was the darker of the two, but not maudlin or depressive darkness, but shadowy, overgrown and dense darkness, forestial and feral darkness, primordial and mammoth.

Originally recorded in the Summer of 2009, then released in October 2010 at the now-defunct UK label Dead Pilot, DTOS was laid to four-track using electric guitars, Lowrey organ and, to some extent, the processing of the tape itself as voice. I'd been absorbing things like Birchville Cat Motel, Omit, Sunn O))) and Ophibre for some time by then, and my INSTALL imprint with David Tagg was still in full-swing, so DTOS very much feels emblematic of that moment in time, when noisy bedroom droning and guitar experimentalism were still the laws of the land, and there was still some kind of a circuit that albums like this could run, between the bloggers and bootleggers circulating and discussing it, the distributors and record stores stocking it and the labels that could eke out an existence publishing it. Many of those things are absent now, moved on from in one way or another, but Diamond Tears remains, solid and resolute as ever, like a pyramid blasted for years by desert sand and sunburnt wind - it looks on, silent in a landscape, sometimes buried, sometimes unearthed, forever waiting for another traveler to discover it.

For this occasion, which is actually the 10th anniversary of the album's original pressing, almost down to the day, I have reassembled the original five tracks, plus a second disc collecting the two original tape sessions of the title track and "Empyrean Crown" (both of which were issued as one of two different bonus 3" CD-Rs with certain faux-obi-stripped copies of DTOS, later reissued digitally as EC/DT), augmented by a new Coppice Halifax dub of LP-closer "Pagan Horn", which transmutes the source material through the veins of a few old samplers and projects it into the hot air floating above Lake Busbee and the old Dolphus M. Grainger generator station, themselves now just a distant memory, vanished and vaporized. Some confusion may also be possible, as the original Dead Pilot edition of DTOS associated track titles and audio incorrectly, while the pieces presented here, with their current names and sequencing, are correct.

NOTE: For those who wish to purchase only the CH excavation, you may do so digitally at the CH Bandcamp page: coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com/album/harvesters-dub

credits

released November 6, 2020

W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded at Rolling Knoll, Summer 2009, using electric guitar, Lowrey organ and a Tascam 414 multitrack tape machine, except "Harvester's Dub" remixed and produced at White Pillar, Summer 2020, using an Akai S2800, Korg ES-1 + Volca Sample + KP-2, Boss RC-20, Alesis Quadraverb and other outboard/DSP FX devices in conjunction with Mackie ProFX8 and Peavey FX2 mixing desks and the R-EW Audioholistics modular processing path. Photography by Brian, shot on Polaroid film in Columbia, SC, 2008. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Text and design by ABM&D. Cover sticker printed in Atlanta, GA by David Tagg. Special thanks to Daniel Gregory and Dead Pilot for publishing DTOS the very first time. This is Milieu Music number AD54, issue #54 in the Arboreal Digest reissue catalog. (c) + (p) Brian Grainger 2020. All nights preserved. milieu-music.com analogbotany.com 17463.space

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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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