Track list:
Side A
1 Walking Out The Latency
Side B
2 Shift Opportunities
Release description:
Northern Twilights first Cassette release from Celer. On sale on discogs or Northern Twilights. Im not just saying this but Dearest Ices is a super piece of ambient drone….its definitely one of our favourites in the Celer story so far. Thanks so much to Will Long for the kindness to allow us release this! Enjoy.
Track list:
1 Holdings Of Electronic Lifts
2 A Small Rush Into Exile
3 Dry And Disconsolate
4 Variorum Of Hierophany
5 A Landscape Once Uniformly White
6 Distance And Mortality
7 With Some Effort, The Sunset
Release description:
In the winter of 2009, I spent two months living and working a short-term job in photography and surveying in South Alberta, Canada. Aside from the job, it gave me the opportunity to work further on Without Retrospect, the Morning, the final part of the water-themed trilogy of albums that included the previous releases Cursory Asperses and In Escaping Lakes. Some days the snow would be so heavy the sun would never show, and ice covered the windows in the mornings. The wind rushed up the banks of the nearby mountains, and whipped against the buildings.
I had brought with me two Sony Tapecorder open reels, and a box of tapes of recordings from the past six months of piano and synthesizer. Using an endless delay system between the two open reels, I listened, layered, cut and pasted the tapes over time. Playing them out loud on the built-in speakers Tapecorder created a new type of texture, from combinations of the ice cold temperatures heated only by the room gas heater, reused tapes, and the decayed quality of the old speakers. After mixing and processing the tapes with microphone and contact microphone recordings of the ice, snow, and sub frequencies of the wind, the cracking and crunching sounds, both high and deep, seemed to appear naturally in the tape. The sub bass widened, and the mid range became thin and fragile.
For more than two years the recordings remained untouched, until recently, now in Tokyo, they were mastered, and recorded to new tapes. The affects of the cold, the sudden sunsets through the snow, and the night winds still stay in my mind, like a soundtrack to those two months, not without their own songs of loneliness but with also beauty, sounds seeming like a siren, embracing every unchangeable and otherwise forgetful moment, even in the bitter winter.
Track list:
1 Slightly Apart, Almost Touching
2 Distressing Sensations
3 Ultra-terrestrial Yearning
4 Absolute Receptivity of All the Senses
Release description:
Recorded in July and August 2012 at Tatami Studios, Tokyo, Japan. All music by Will Long. Released as a limited edition CDR on Still*Sleep.
Track list:
Side A
1 Experiences Of Insight And Untimeliness / Happening Too Soon, And Sooner Than Normal / Whistle, And Fade / Destinal Formlessness Of A Particular End / Missed Scene / Unrealized Excerpt / Missed Scene II / Warm Closure
Side B
2 A Perpetual Lack Of Fervor / Upwards, On Tenterhooks / Drop & Let / Memories / Hold Me Tight, But Remember I’m Not Really There / Time And Ebb
Side C
3 All At Once Is What Eternity Is
Side D
4 The Die That’s Caste
Release description:
For George and Nina Benson
I, Anatomy
My friend, 103 years old, sat across the room from me, a small gas heater nearby, with photos of family and Martin Luther King, Jr., and we talked for a few hours in the late morning. I had brought him a plant a few years before, and planted it in the front yard, but it had died the winter before.
A carnival in Costa Mesa, California. Kids screaming on the rollercoasters, the sound of balloons popping, machinery spinning, with smells of beer and popcorn all over the ground.
In an airplane flying over Papeete, the safety and welcome announcement CD skipped at such a point that the voices became a looped choir, as the plane coasted in circles around the edges of beaches, and the stewardess ran in the tipping plane in heels to fix the CD.
We made a box of tape loops in the Malibu Motel, from strings and pianos, and an old reel to reel tape of Sinatra. From the top of the cliffs, the view was completely clear, and even in a completely black and starless night, nothing stirred.
A few stories, put together with no previous purpose, than having their own place and time. In being put together, something new is formed. This was the basis for I, Anatomy. There wasn’t any intention, it was just a diary. These things happened, and became the source material, finding their directions from what was before directionless, and become the whole. Going back to these moments and memories, I, Anatomy isn’t a story, it’s one hundred stories.
The original I, Anatomy also included the EPs All At Once Is What Eternity Is and The Die That’s Caste, now together in a single edition as they were originally intended, with artwork by Christoph Heemann.
Track list:
1 Motionless At Lake Underhere / Losing Funnel / Whirlybirdy / Entrancing Entrenchment / Midnight On The Streets Around The Pointed Towers Of Gading Kirana / Lazy Beauty
2 Layered Where I Can Listen Closely / Backseat Fadeout / An Infinite Blast Of Icy Air / Delayed Jitterbugs / Sampoernas Rising In The Heat Of Summer
3 Fill Your Light With Lessness / Untitled / Guilt As A Return To Melancholy
Release description:
Celer is the solo ambient project of sound artist Will Long, who works out of Tokyo, Japan. He is well known for producing dense, emotive creations that are never lost in the gloom of myriad other ambient releases, due to the remarkable delicacy of each layer of sound in his pieces, which never become overwhelming or too drawn-out to to sustain their initial emotional content, as is so often the case with many extended ambient compositions.
Indeed, the thought that goes into Celer releases is evident from the incredibly detailed titles that Long has given to each of the three tracks on Epicentral Examples of the More or Less, with each small portion of the title being relevant to an individual phase within each overall track – an arrangement choice which is made, on listening, into a feat of compositional skill, due to the fact that the tracks, even when starkly cutting between samples of reversing tapes, field recordings, and Celer’s trademark throbbing, glowing drones, at no point ever sound merely like a compilation of small pieces.
Rather, the album remains cohesive overall, and whilst at points the listener is met with surprises in the form of phasing waves of bright sequencers – a sound that many would never have imagined Long using after listening to releases such as Evaporate and Wonder – or even acid-house synth waves on Fill Your Light With Lessness from the third and final track – Epicentral Examples of the More or Less retains the genuine emotive content that has become a cornerstone of Celer releases, coupled with a creative talent that leaves most contemporary ambient music dead in the water.
Recorded over two years in Jakarta, Indonesia and Tokyo, Long appears to have had time to revisit these recordings over and over again, allowing him to produce a release that is simultaneously a step forward for Celer’s sound, and the level of musical wizardry that the rest of the ambient scene must now aspire to reach.
Track list:
1 Voluminous Files of Multi-colored Lines / AM Arrest and Conclusion
2 Remaining Impassive, the Other Replied / Yellow-lit Tiers of Drawback Methodology // Flooded Rooms of Machinery // Moccasin
3 Neutral Tremors of Reclusive Intensity / 幡ヶ谷駅 // Looming Face /// Hissing Brilliance //// Buzzing Heartbeat
4 Sharp Sequel
5 A Less-abrupt, Multi-colored (but faded) Ending
Cover painting by Yuki Izumi
Track list:
Side A
1 An Unforced Cheerfulness
Side B
2 Involuntary Impromptu
Release description:
Currently living in Japan, Will Long takes hold of each on-coming second and handles them individually with the care of a maker, a craftsman.. a mortal creator. Don’t plan on it.
Track list:
Side A
1 Bedded In Shallow Blades
Side B
2 Repertoire Of Dinless Shifts
Release description:
Since 2005, Celer, the duo of the late Danielle Marie Baquet and William Thomas Long, have released a wealth of ambient material and established themselves as one of the preeminent and best loved outfits in the genre. For the uninitiated, Celer’s aesthetic is glacial, beautiful and devotional. It is utterly devoid of hard edges and culled from a wealth of exotic and traditional instrumentation. The pair’s inimitable sound is the result of careful attention to processing and a keen, quasi-cinematic ear for arrangement and juxtaposition. The source material for the recordings on Evaporate and Wonder was limited to improvised synthesizers and field recordings, but the end results are predictably grand and mysterious, suitable indeed for the promises of the album’s title. Comprised of two sidelong pieces, this record is a perfect entry point into the pair’s wonderful oeuvre or, if you’re like me, a more than welcome audio pictogram that lets us as listeners continue the journey.
Track list:
Side A
1 Faint Sights Through Shielded Sunlight
2 Facing Formlessness
3 Photo Poems And Intentional Indigence
Side B
4 Fearing Keys Of Anxious Days
5 Negative Swell
6 Nearby Genesis
Release description:
In the Finger-Painted Fields of the Eyes is everything you would expect from a Celer/Will Long release. It’s subdued, introspective, lonely, and beautiful. It’s almost as if a lifetime’s worth of quiet moments were collected and then transferred onto tape. If you’re in a space where you need something to bring you down and mellow you out, this would be it.
Initially this tape was going to be roughly one hour long. As the production process rolled on, Will sent us a second version that pushed the length of the tape to be nearly 30 minutes longer. It’s an astounding collection of music that we are very lucky and honored to be able to present.
Track list:
1 Weak Ends
Release description:
Sitting on the mountainside, the palm forests looked down over the farm-tilled sugar cane fields, and beyond over the blue and turquoise ocean. The towns were littered and far away, made of sand-bleached houses with toys sitting in the yard. We tiptoed over the broken coral rocks to the beach, and stayed there under the passing thunder clouds, the ocean turning a deep blue, and melting into the evening. We walked through the town looking for dinner, checking out the front of every restaurant in the town before finally choosing the one across the street from our hotel. Once back at the hotel, we washed our clothes in the hotel washing machine, channel surfed through the same 5 channels without success, and fell asleep. Two weeks later, I still have sand in my shoes.
‘Weak Ends’ was recorded and mixed before and after a trip to Okinawa in July, 2013. It included a PDF of seven selected photographs.
‘Weak Ends’ was available in a limited edition CDR package on the August 2013 Japan tour of Celer with Christoph Heemann and Jim O’Rourke.