Category: miscellaneous

grateful anytime someone listens, let alone shares their thoughts. but apparently this review surfaced yesterday. thanks to underhill lounge for the thoughts. i suppose i need to dig into some steve lacy now. review below:

“I’ve recently been interested in building layers of intentional chaos and exploring perceptions of order and the natural human tendency to seek and find patterns within that sound.  There is a deliberate contrast between the controlled chaos simulating the natural world and the synthetic sounds I’m working with.“

Two longer pieces and 4 shorter pieces.

Names of the pieces use words in combination with three primary words, Flock, Flap, and Chirp.

Sounds seem primarily programmatically generated or manipulated. While it says below that these were recorded during a “sampler performance”, the sounds themselves seldom sound as if they were drawn from the natural world, except in the most abstract sense.

With the quote from their website which opens this writeup, it is hard to know how many of the event streams are simply set in motion and how many of them might be manipulated during their progress.

In general, what order which is expressed in the pieces is more like the order of nature sounds than the order of music. I.e., in general, there is no apparent tempo in most pieces relating the divergent sounds to the other sounds. When tempo does develop in events, as in track 4, “FLOCK1_MILCHI”, the tempos of the different event streams converge, but don’t affect the tempo of other event streams.

As if, in an algorithmic forest, we are listening to the sounds of algorithmic wind ticking through algorithmic branches as algorithmic creatures frolicking in that artificial world, all to the tempo or progress along the events of their algorithmic day.

On the other hand, while synthetic, it is not particularly harsh or dissonant, and somehow a pleasant feeling of lightness or almost whimsy is present in most pieces.

As an exercise, I recommend you listen to “Chirps” by Steve Lacy and Evan Parker, before, during, or after listening to Flocking 19 by Shedding.

“Assembled from July 2019 sampler performances in Milwaukee (Jazz Gallery) and Chicago (Elastic Arts)”

claude (writing) and ola aldous (art) are doing a super cool zine called deft esoterica. i’ve gotten both issues, but issue 2, from fall 2019, has been sitting in my to-read pile for a long time. fostering dachshunds means we occasionally have a quarantine up and i go through stretches of not being in my record listening/reading room. well, i’m back to it and have a bit more time to chip away at my ‘to read’ stack. another wonderful issue that i can’t recommend enough. claude’s ‘voice’ in his writing is inquisitive, passionate, and positive. i had the pleasure of hanging with them when we played the show referenced in the review and i can tell you it’s truly the vibe claude has in person as well. anyway, in deft esoterica #2 he reviewed the ‘karl’ split tape that josh and i did for our tour in summer 2018. read that review below, and check out deft esoterica. these little zines are just so refreshing. i believe the physical tape for karl is sold out, but josh has digital available on his bandcamp page here.

Ola and I played a (Figure From Ground) show with Shedding last summer, the day before the formal start of the Shedding/Josh Mason summer tour.  We caught Shedding the next day at Autumn Records in Winooski, Vermont, but Josh was unfortunately unable to make the gig.  Lusky, I just found this tour momento.  The Shedding side showcases Connor Bell’s synth manipulations as well as some field recording that eventually provides the underpinnings for something of a reprise of the squelchy, honking yelps and near “bouncing ball” bloops.  Fascinating and tasty timbres, a bit like dragging your finger on a newly inflated rubber inner tube and bumping it around, with some liquid filter drips. 

Josh Mason’s side has a crackling ambient quality with melodic lines woven behind artifactual pops and interference.  This is not an unsettled calm, it more like the satisfaction of “letting things be” in an uncertain and chaotic world.  Mason has a tape release on the Dauw label, out of Belgium, which makes sense to me, hearing this work.  Very complimentary artists, Shedding’s inclusion of the field recording speaks to Mason’s textures and Mason’s tastefully chaotic seasoning resonates with Shedding’s deliberate bwonkiness.

fluf now has a page on their site for the release here.

boomkat is also distributing the release here. this is what they have to say about the release: “A pleasingly tart and sticky delicacy for the ears, ‘Flocking KF Variations’ approximates the feeling of slipping down MC Escher’s plughole. It’s recommended to listen to these 62 tracks on random shuffle with infinitely amorphous results.”