Archive for October, 2011

Alioth vol.6 ~Autumn~

2011.10.09 sun open 17:30 / start 18:30
charge : ¥1,500 + 1drink order
place : ongakunojikan / Mitaka

Live :
Celer http://www.thesingularwe.org/celer/
Masahito Mannen http://soundcloud.com/masahito-mannen
Tsutomu Satachi http://www.tsutomusatachi.com/
Junji Koyanagi http://koyanagi.celescape.org

Installation :
Kuroki Akira
Shingo Sasaki http://kamio-kamichi.com
Yuki Shimbo
Chelsea Maika http://chelsea.jugem.ne.jp/
Junji Koyanagi

Food :
bahha http://d.hatena.ne.jp/bahha4u/

information :
Alioth http://alioth.celescape.org/
event info http://bar.towntone.com/2011/10/09.html
ongakunojikan http://bar.towntone.com/

 

 

Ooh I like a bit of Celer in the evening. Daytime it doesn’t work for me but come the evening I’m all ready to be pulverized into a fluffy Phil of calmness and tranquility. Always a pleasure, never a chore. This was originally released in 2009 as a triple 3” CD set and is now well rocking horse. So and/OAR have done a slightly more fan-base friendly edition of 300 in a digipack with a flying chair on. Celer are really rather good at creating warm sounding drone music and this three track album (each track twenty minutes plus) cements this. There’s no mass variation from their palette here but you’re probably not expecting that. You get three very long tracks which ebb and flow, throb and pulse with the gentlest of variations and somewhat rarely for drone music they have that bit of feeling about them which makes ‘em all warm sounding. You know what you’re getting with Celer and if you’re after the drone badge of quality then this gets it.

Link

Available for pre-order  – the second in the self-released black vinyl series.
*Please note that the records will not be pressed until I have received the first 30 orders.
Limited edition of 100 copies, on black vinyl, in a black matte sleeve, with handwritten credits. It is available to pre-order immediately from the Celer Bandcamp page, and upon order of a physical copy, you will receive an instantaneous download in any format you choose. Thank you for your support!

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“I wish somebody would sprinkle me all over with talcum powder”. Not the usual sampledelia, surely you’ll agree. But for Chubby Wolf, the late moniker of Dani Baquet-Long, one half of Ambient cult duo Celer, she has succor off to a tee; developmental stasis counterbalance, slightly tipped hour glass for your seconds and minutes to slip through. Chimes and piano are distributed like butter in turkey sandwiches: the drone being strong garnish inside the layers (guitar, synth) and slices (car wheels spinning to a halt on “Cantankerous Baby”; wolf cries on “Intrusively Coexisting” as bookend field recordings).

Boy I adore albums like Chubby Wolf’s. It’s so good I touched five plays in the first day. From the grounded nature of the elegant, peaceful “Birthday Suit” and “Short Dick”, spare-worded epilogues of humble human form, to the repetition-pleated leftovers: “Rattling Mandibles” / “Cruel Sausage Gentle Fingers”, there’s safe auditory wombs to participate in, and Dani has successfully managed chemistry with accessibility, synthetically washing Stars Of The Lid grandeur against rawer, paler shades, said to constitute her voice.

Now, as a huge fan of Grouper, you could strategise to ignore Dani’s vocal appropriation. Her tones are barely there, in a sense that you’ll have to look to make them out, and Liz Harris was criticised for this pre-”Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill”. Nonetheless to much for it, I wager she’s done a job that has values in quiet desire, and the internal consistency of harmonisation works wonders for the record’s integrity as a whole. To put it another way: survival (hearing, processing, deciding to keep, or move on) that’s an upper-lip-stiffening exercise grants little longevity in response to sultry pleasures of the not-so-crooning kind.

Battles of attention over distraction has been a recurrent ghostwriting for Ambient LPs, causing fracture to the genre’s many offshoots since 80s “Apollo” soundtrack tranquilised ambience as art. Where Chubby Wolf’s debut could have been a crucible to inadequacy, then, instead it’s decidedly solid and flexible at core, a “hang in there” clothes peg. The great design of Dani’s first full-length, assembled with help of husband Will Long, draws out the resonances as a helix, where upon re-listening you reach the same point but at a higher level. This is pragmatic for labels including
Digitalis, who pride themselves on releasing some of the finest, emotionally challenging, and at the same time, soothing material, and Dani Baquet-Long, as with Will, have only contributed to the trend. Essential!

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Chubby Wolf was the recording name of Dani Baquet-Long, one half of Celer, who sadly didn’t live to see the realisation of so much of her work. The extravagant, oversized, map-clad packaging dwarfs the understated content of this cassette, a suite of the quietest of drones. On Maudlin And Elusive, we are given a chart of the heart, and left to orienteer it with no compass. Hints and hidden meanings dance among the dark shadows, and coded references populate track titles. A voice emerges: a moan? a scream? a cry? of pleasure or pain? Traces of quiet emotion float on the surface like white paper on foam, being pulled back under the ebbing sea of tape hiss. Limited to one hundred copies, these pieces feel like whispers to friends, shared secrets, and love letters; like eavesdropping on something deeply personal. It hurts. It haunts.

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