Format: Cassette
Label: Patient Sounds
Catalog: PS109
Release date: 2/14/19
Track list:
1 A1-A4
2 B1-B3
Release description:
Vamps (phrases with variation for upright piano)
For the uninitiated, to be said simply, Celer is Will Long. Born and raised in the American South, and now living in Japan, Long is a stalwart in the ambient and house music communities, known for his masterful, prolific, and earnest styles. An approachably existential tenderness permeates Long’s work: music and art is a means, not for just expression, but for an existing through. Documentation of time and patience as autoethnographic research. Like his snapshots, including photos used here for artwork, Long’s practice is to turn the quotidian into the transcendent through temperance. Celer has amassed a large body of recordings in his/their nearly 13 years active, and Patient Sounds is honored to contribute to this profound and prodigious legacy. Vamps arrives as a minimal meditation on repeated phrases. Melancholic and contemplative, acoustic piano phrases and cassette tape phasing as a means of meditation. A sunset with the sustain firmly compressed. Time has shifted in that silence, a silent second is an anechoic chamber, feathers caught beating at the lonely light.
Feather (white) shell / Sustain (gold) imprint
– Patient Sounds
Package description:
Feather (white) shell / Sustain (gold) imprint
Press reviews:
Tabs Out
Tokyo-based Will Long may hold the record for most releases ever by an artist. Seriously. The hyperlinked “Celer” just up there goes to his Bandcamp page, and you may spend the next month, month and a half or so combing through it. Maybe longer. Long certainly gets the “patient” thing, so it makes sense for him to finally link his talents to PS. “Vamps,” of course, sounds anything but like what the title implies, as there are no vampires to be found at all in these two sidelong pieces. But oh! The dictionary includes another definition, a verb meaning “to repeat a short, simple passage of music.” This makes more sense, as the quiet piano figures move slowly, ghostlike, gently drifting like snowflakes on the breeze. So even though Will Long’s on the other side of the bloody planet, he’s still able to find that gentleness, that peacefulness that a cold winter’s night can bring, if, of course, you’re not out in it. Imagine that – someone from a faraway place connecting through music to us waaay over here. People aren’t so different after all, right?