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Grey Anthelion

by Brian Grainger

supported by
Peter Wisckow
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Jose Angel Morilla Sanchez
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/
1.
For Solo Electric Guitar 18:13
2.
For Organ & Pedal Bass 15:17
3.
For Prepared Feedback With Four Microphones 42:53

about

Upon assembling the masters for the 2008 Anthelion recordings' 2019 reissue, I stumbled across this three-track album from 2009 that I thought lost for most of the last decade. Originally planned as a "Live Anthelion" release, these three pieces focused individually on isolated instrumental sound sources, presented in an almost purist approach. They are each live iterations of Anthelion - a conceptual title that is never given life as a "standard recorded version", but rather, an ongoing series of elementally and seasonally inspired variations.

Revisiting these three recordings very much brought me back to my old studio at Rolling Knoll, where I was constantly exploring and experimenting with improvisational ideas, at all hours of the night and day. I seem to remember that these pieces were laid down on a rainy February day, which made the Grey Anthelion descriptor appropriate.

The first piece bears a lot of similarity to the doom and drone records I was listening to at that time, and also certain recordings I'd made with David Tagg as part of our VCV & Viking Destroyer catalogues. It is a rippling cascade of Electro Harmonix distortion and open-tuning resonance, and one of the heaviest guitar pieces I've issued in some time.

The second piece recalls some of the Eight Thousander album, with an open-air microphone setup placed close to the fuzzy speaker of my Lowrey "Magic Genie" organ. At that time, I was running odd setups where the microphone would be routed through a looper and other effects before it ended up on the tape, which combined with the non-direct signal input to create a warm haze of texture, soft noise and strange spaces. The same configuration can be heard on the Blue Wheatfield album, and a couple tracks on Nine Billion Names.

The third piece is the most elaborate and lengthy, at almost 43 minutes. It was created using a live "performance" of playing back a four-track cassette filled with four separate recordings of microphone feedback, which were prepared as they were laid to tape with realtime pitch shifting and FX saturations. In this way, I was able to turn the four-track recorder into a four-voice synthesizer, and after routing the machine through the aforementioned looper, reverbs and delays, the same one side of a prepared tape could yield hours of different and unique output possibilities. I repeated this process while working on the Whitehope album years later, and performed Whitehope live with it numerous times as well.

Altogether, Grey Anthelion echoes a time when I was happily lost at sea, occasionally stopping at nameless unmapped islands, before moving on to chase the unreachable line on the horizon once more. Many recordings were made, such as these, which focused on the process rather than the result. The trip, but never the destination. This method of working and thinking has stayed with me ever since, and the further out I go into the borderlands of Deep Earth, the forests of Verdant Acre and the cosmic void of the Workingman's Drone series, the more fascinating these dusty diamonds become. Finding and releasing Grey Anthelion has inspired me to resume the Anthelion concept, and for the first time in ten years, new Anthelion variations are underway.

credits

released March 27, 2019

W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded live, February 2009, at Rolling Knoll. Mastered by The Analog Botanist at White Pillar, February 2019. Text and design by ABM&D. This is Milieu Music number MML134.

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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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