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“I had been working on a set of small,
7” × 3” images in my
pocket sketch book using ink and tea, with the tea bags acting as the brush
to apply the tea washes. I had some notion of using these images as a
graphic score, but the project had not fully gelled in my mind as yet when
I showed the images to an artist friend, Jeff Molloy. He said, ‘They look
like battle maps to me.’ This statement almost instantaneously solidified
the whole concept in my mind.
I sent two images—different for each
person—together with a brief text describing my intentions for the project
to each of the musicians who appear on the album. The instructions guiding how
the images should be interpreted were very open, but some constraints were
given—for example, I requested that each performance, echoing the 7-inch
length of the images, be 7 minutes long.
I have spent many years in and around zen meditation, and I asked Paulette Wilkins, one of my
Sangha sisters, if she would chant the Zen Robe Chant for me to use to
perfume the recordings and tie them together.
At the same time I was going to visit an old friend,
Graham Walmsley, and I emailed him this note: “You are a grunt in the
trenches, you are going over the top and will be dead tomorrow, write a
letter to your mother and I will record when I see you” The result was
fantastic.
None of the participants heard (except
for me) what any other artist had done. I recorded my own sections and
edited and arranged the other recordings, making almost no other revisions
to the submitted work.
Jeff
Molloy passed away a few months ago—a wonderful artist, sorely missed.”
—Lance Austin Olsen
Photograph by Jamie Drouin
Performed
by Joda Clément, Bruno Duplant,
Lee Noyes, Lance Austin Olsen, Mathieu Ruhlmann,
and Gil Sanson. “Letter to mother” written and
read by Graham Walmsley. Zen Robe Chant performed by Paulette Wilkins.
Score and mixing by Lance Austin Olsen. Mastered by A.F. Jones at Laminal
Audio, San Diego, California.
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Joda Clément has been performing and composing experimental
music for over 15 years. His work utilizes analog and acoustic instruments,
field recordings, and feedback to carefully construct listening
environments that transcend a distinction between sound, site, and source.
His music has been released internationally on labels such as Alluvial
Recordings (US), Mystery Sea (BE), Unfathomless
(BE), Simple Geometry (CA), caduc (CA), and
Notice Recordings (US).
Bruno Duplant is a composer, sound manipulator, and
multi-instrumentalist based in the north of France whose primary
instruments include the doublebass, percussion,
organ, electronics, and field recordings. A frequent collaborator with a
wide range of musicians from around the globe, his recordings have been
published by labels including Another Timbre, Notice Recordings, B-Boim, Diafani, Engraved
Glass, Ilse, Impulsive Habitat, Con-V, Unfathomless,
and Mystery Sea, among many others. Together with his friend Pedro Chambel, he founded and continues to run the label Rhizome.s..
Lee
Noyes is an improvising musician, instrumentalist, and composer
who works in multifaceted ways within experimental
music, noise, free improvisation. Works primarily with feedback systems,
piano and percussion. A long-time resident of Dunedin, New Zealand now
based in Gothenburg, Sweden, he has performed across Australasia and in
Europe and had music published on various labels in Europe, Scandinavia,
North America and Australia. Latest release, Threhhlasb
Andng Nmer, with Miguel
A. Garcia and David Gómez is available now on Tanzprocesz.
Lance Austin Olsen is a visual artist, improviser, and
composer based in British Columbia.
His working method is uniform across both his visual art and his
sound work: a surface is endlessly reworked, with each subsequent piece
forming a record or narrative of ongoing discovery. “Only the present
moment is lit.”
Mathieu
Ruhlmann is a sound artist residing in Vancouver, British
Columbia. Ruhlmann’s
work seeks to broadcast small intimate sonic happenings and phenomena
through the use of field recording, natural material, and found objects and
in doing so develop and arrive at a dialogue with the inaudible and tactile
space of the environment.
Gil Sanson is a multimedia artist and composer currently based in caracas. His audio work emphasizes the nature of sound
and its capability to transcend stylistic boundaries. He has worked with
improvisers such as Ben Owen, Dave Gross, and the EA Collective. His work
as a composer includes verbal scores as well as random processes and fixed
forms using compositional techniques applied to concrete sound. His
preoccupation with paradox and a nonlinear relationship with the
technological continuum are his main interests regarding the medium of
sound,
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