Blog Archives

Track list:
1 Anticline Rests; Inertia Brace Yourself
2 Collections Of Fogs And Ladling Clarities
3 Who Feels Like Me, Who Wants Like Me, Who Doubts Any Good Will Come Of This
4 How Dear This Ear Of Reason, Beneath The Backlit Sun

Release description:
“Opening in medias res with field recordings that slowly shift into a haze of hovering tones, Will and Dani’s loop- based constructions flicker and unfurl at an unhurried pace, ebbing into one another, decaying into resonant silence. Indeed, “Panoramic Dreams…” proves to be an apt title for this collection, as each track enacts a sort of bleary-eyed navigation of an imagined landscape. There is a profound sense of melancholy in these recordings, but also a subjunctive quality that is hard to ignore- a meditation on possibility, on what might come to pass. Like the best Celer recordings, the four tracks collected here evoke in this listener a sense oflonging and nostalgia, the object of which remains opaque and elusive, but ultimately no less affecting.” – Basses Frequences

Track list:
1 Pockets Of Wheat Parts I – VII

Release description:
Soundscaping Records are very pleased to invite Celer for the label’s second release, Pockets of Wheat, a most special album to us.

The album was recorded during a three day journey driving across the US from California to Mississippi, while the musician couple spent their days at a small hotel in Northern Texas. During these three days, they realized the concept of ‘Pockets of Wheat/Exteriors’, created illustrations for their intent of the music and penned down a library of notes and structures to use. Hence, made many field recordings and string recordings with equipment brought along, while other piano pieces were recorded later on an old, unused family piano.

From their room at the back of the hotel, they saw endless stretches of wheat fields. With open windows, the couple noticed the constant sound of the wheat blowing from the wind, an almost gentle, yet persistent, crackling and fuzz, but also changed constantly. Creating music in their original form, drawing on feelings of togetherness, intimacy, and the expansiveness surrounding them, with the ever-changing landscape, the concept of ‘Pockets of Wheat/Exteriors’ was perceived. With associations to the ghost of Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows, in entirety founded in nature, perceptions arose through constant interpretation of the sounds of nature; aggression, subtlety, intimacy, and distance.

Roughly five hours of recordings of cello, violin, piano, bells, crickets, and wind were then applied the idea of an ‘always changing but always the same’ idea to it. Splicing the recordings to about hundred 5-10 second tape loops, the loops were then played back from laptops and repeated in arbitrarily selected order by the two musicians without predetermined order. As such, the movements of the wheat in the fields by the winds were mimicked: always similar, but constantly changing.

The enclosed recording contains 7 movements, though they are strung together not to break the continuity. The several layers found within the recording are not always discernible, but are still there, just more subtle, as is the case with details in nature. Nature’s presence is also an imperative, though not the sole inspiration, but in the end the music of Celer in Pockets of Wheat expresses purely their feelings, identity and the atmosphere surrounding these moments, and in keeping with a continuous recording, captures the essence of what is heard in our daily lives, essentially one singular thing: sound.

Track list:
1 Floating Parasomnia
2 The Enlightened Scapegrace
3 Obtuse Sensibility

Release description:
“Dedicated to the anonymous & unknown.”

Originally self-published as a very limited triple 3″ CDR release in May, 2009, Celer’s Levitation And Breaking Points is now available again on CD – this time limited to 300 copies. Surely one of Celer’s most subtly beautiful and uplifting albums out of an already beautiful, highly prolific and much celebrated discography of work. Especially magical to listen to in the early evening as the sunlight fades below the horizon… a balm for the soul.

Photography and cover design by Dale Lloyd.

Track list:
1 Spelunking The Arteries Of Our Ancestors
2 The Look That Falls Upon Us Extends As If A Landform
3 Igenous Matters Most
4 Vitiating The Incline
5 How Long To Hold Up A Breathless Face
6 Awake For A Wake, Dead But For A Life
7 Lithospheric Plates Are Cleanly Forgotten
8 Espy The Horizon, Miss The Lost Road
9 Whimsical At The Cretaceous Extinction
10 I Ate Socialist Meals In The Company Mess Hall

Release description:
2011 Remastered CD reissue on Con-v.

Track list:
1. Pleased To Be In A State Of Sour Resplendency
2. Things Gone And Still Here

Release description:
I remember photos and negatives of sun-scorched Nepal scattered around the floor, notebooks written in randomly and seeming empty, and the evening lights of the outside night that seemed like they wouldn’t ever darken. We drove to Santa Ana over the 405 freeway to record the cars going by, but ended up watching the lights, buying whisky, and sitting the car listening to scratched Joanna Newsom CDRs and Eno’s Discreet Music. When the night was finally asleep and quiet, everything seemed still and the streets seemed dead, except for the swaying palm trees, and the glow from the kitchen light that was never turned off. Even the things that don’t exist anymore are still there, even if they aren’t apparent and obvious as much as they once were”.

Track list:
1 1-24

Release description:
“Tightrope was created in 2010. That November I visited Tokyo to tour with Yui Onodera to promote our Generic City album. On the last Saturday of the tour, I took part in a collaboration performance at a temple in Tokyo with Opitope and Corey Fuller, where I played some of the source pieces used in Tightrope. It was unfinished, but when I returned to my home it was completed in a short time. One month later, on December 31st 2010, I moved to Tokyo.

Though presented as one continuous track without breaks, Tightrope is a collage of 24 separately titled pieces. Layer upon layer, they were mixed on top
on top
on top
on top
on top on top
on top on top
on top on top
on top on top on top

on top
on top of each other, and given a single place.

It has many different instruments and sound sources. Piano, television, synthesizers, fire crackling in the fireplace, whistling, pipe organ, eating ice, acoustic guitar, laptop, an afternoon conversation, a medicine drip buzzer, car noise, my ringtone, contact mic and many others I can’t remember. At the time, it never occurred to me to keep track of these things. In the end, they’re all collected, unplanned memories.” – Will Long, Tokyo, January 2012

Design by mondii, published in an edition of 500 copies. For my Father.

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 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:
1-1 Motions That Vary Due To Height
1-2 The Overhead Emptiness
1-3 Being Closer To The Sun
2 Fires That Light Up The Night
3-1 Strong, Exhilarating Effects
3-2 Yearly Delta
3-3 Autopilot
4-1 Weak Hillsides
4-2 Resignation Tendency
4-3 Hot Tower
4-4 Free Daydream

Release description:
Dear Jerry,

I’m somewhere around 20,000 feet, and I think I’m freezing to death. Please send blankets. We’re on the way to oversee a polar station in the middle of nowhere. It’s 9 hours there, and 9 hours back. On this giant plane, there’s only 6 of us. There’s somebody in this nose compartment with me, for Arctic topography. He’s constantly airsick from staring at the moving ground. As the medical officer, my job is mostly passing out airsick bags, and wearing 3 flight suits so I won’t freeze to death.

I’m looking forward to Thanksgiving dinner next week at home, and I’ll be happy to see you. Mother is running in tight circles at home getting ready for the occasion, and Daddy is fasting so he can make the most of the brief period of gluttony. I heard about the menu already, but I’ll let that be a surprise for you. It will be great to have a home-cooked meal again. I think we had frozen chicken for dinner last night.

It’s mid-day now, and all I can see ahead of us is endless flat ice. Thankfully the water system in the BOQ at Ladd is now fixed. For the last few weeks, we’ve all had to shower next door, and then run at high speed back to our building through the sub-zero temperatures. I’m seriously jealous of you in Guam. Sitting on the beach, playing gold, swimming in the ocean. Want to trade? Alaska is beautiful, if you want a change.

See you next week,
Bill

William A. Long, Jr., Fairbanks, November 15, 1960

Our flight to Tokyo left at 5pm, following the sunset to the west as we climbed north for 3 hours. The airport was filled with tourists on their way home, with boxes of mangoes and pineapples. It was mango day yesterday. Soon after we got to cruising altitude, the islands disappeared into endless ocean, and everyone seemed to fall asleep. The stewardess offering ice cream passed by unnoticed, and the passengers sank into their straw hats. The lights stay low, but I keep watching out the window, continually sucked into the sunset, and the distant mountains of clouds hanging over the ocean. Even Rie falls asleep, and the outside seems to gently disappear for all the sleeping passengers. The holiday is over, and we’re returning home.

When we reach Tokyo, it’s already dark, and the farm fields of Narita are dark blue and foggy in the evening mist, the small yellow lights of the houses sitting still under the half-hidden new moon edging over the horizon. Tomorrow I’ll develop our film, and we’ll start taking pictures again. There are always those leftover shots after a trip, of the just-after-returning from a trip photos. They’re of your home, or people and places you see everyday. But maybe in the end, these are the most genuine from the entire roll.

Will Long, Tokyo, 2013

Climbing Formation is packaged in a matte-coated, full color digipak, pressed on a glass-mastered CD in an edition of 500 copies.

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Release description:
‘Radish’ was created as a daydream. Each track was made of different layers of instruments, field recordings, television, and discarded objects. The tracks were mixed without specific structure, and instead in an almost blind and directionless form, to later be processed together for a flowing, pure and imaginative sequence of memories.

“A daydream is an evasion.” – Thomas Merton