Archive for January, 2014

Coming in early March is a new album titled Zigzag, on the Japanese label Spekk. This is a very special album for me, and and step in a different direction as well. The CD is packaged in a 170 x 145mm large & wide custom-made cardboard sleeves, and along with the first orders is Seesaw, a limited edition CDR album in a handmade package, available only with the purchase of the Zigzag album. Thank you for your support, and please don’t miss this special album.

Press text:

Several years ago while living in the United States, I became interested in the minimalist music of the 1960’s and 1970’s, and new wave of the early 1980’s, with the steady pulses, the constant harmonies, and endless continuity. The music had a strong persistence, and while the listener can drift away from following it consciously, the rhythm stays grounded. In it there is something human, like a heartbeat.

At the time I had the idea to use this inspiration with my own music, giving the music a tempo, and a new pathway in a forward direction. I created Zigzag, and agreed to release the album through Spekk, but after several years, the project was delayed, and I went on to other projects, and the initial inspiration and concept disappeared.

In the summer of 2013, I found out that my wife and I would have our first child. Around this time, plans began to come together for the release of Zigzag. After missing the first few doctor’s appointments, I was finally able to attend, and for the first time heard the baby’s heartbeat. It seemed like such a fateful connection between the baby and the music. When new life begins, everything points toward the future.

– Will Long, 2014

An interesting backstory attends Celer’s latest release Voyeur, and it’s one that brings into clearer focus the at times foreboding ambiance of the album content. Apparently a few years ago Will Long was commissioned by a California-based film company to produce a score for a film inspired by Hitchcock’s 1954 film Rear Window, a key difference being that the projected film would include a two-sided viewer plot as opposed to the one in Hitchcock’s that centers on the perspective of the temporarily wheelchair-bound photographer L.B. Jefferies (played by Jimmy Stewart). Long created the material prior to the commencement of filming at home and at a studio in Silverlake, California, only to be told that the entire film project had been cancelled—despite the fact that the musical material had been completed a week before the first draft deadline.

That’s not all that’s curious about the release, which Berlin-based Humming Conch has issued in a run of 300 vinyl copies. Though the recording was made in March of 2008, it’s only now seeing the light of day as a soundtrack to a film never made. And unlike many a Celer release where one encounters long-form pieces of twenty-minute durations, Voyeur sequences eleven tracks into a thirty-four-minute presentation—though such an approach is consistent with soundtracks in general, where short musical pieces typically are composed with specific scenes in mind. Another interesting thing about the release is that Danielle Baquet-Long, Will’s late partner, is credited with vocals, but one must listen carefully to hear them as they’ve been incorporated into the opening and closing tracks as barely audible choral breaths.

Curious details aside, Voyeur is quintessential Celer in its skeletal drift of fragile, shimmering vapours and whistling, organ-like tones. But as mentioned, Voyeur also parts company with Celer music as it’s often presented, specifically in settings such as “Bitter Light and Anticipating a Day Heat (The Isolated)” and “Binoculars, a Telephone, and Fear (The Note)” where dissonance and darker tonalities emerge to lend the material a haunted and unsettled quality. In such moments, one imagines Voyeur could just as easily function as a modern-day soundtrack to Hitchcock’s Vertigo or (in its non-violent episodes, at least) Psycho as much as Rear Window. The inclusion of these darker passages also adds to the release in providing contrast to episodes like “Intermission (Afternoon, Don’t End)” and “Finale (After Midnight)” that are comparatively serene in character. Relatedly, Voyeur also suggests that film producers would be wise to consider Celer for future soundtrack commissions; it’s hard to think of any musical act more naturally capable of creating soundtrack material that’s suitably atmospheric and evocative without being overly intrusive.

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