| $14.85
new to stock as of
april 4th, 2008
threads:
analogue-synth
modern-psych
electro-acoustic-composition
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| | | kvist (usa) #kvist 002 lp joe raglani “web of light • part i” long playing record - the last ride (11:55)
- bardophasing (7:45)
- impossible love (4:55)
| | click the play button to hear an excerpt of "bardophasing" |
| april 2008 release ; i had heard a bit of joe raglani’s music c/o the releases he’s sent over on his pegasus farms label & the split w/mike shiflet’s scenic railroads, but a prescient concert promoter (kvist’s john tamm-buckle) had the foresight to put us on the same bill in the stl a few months back & i got the chance to sit & give his music my full attention ... needless to say i was considerably impressed with the range & depth of sounds he managed to conjure up from a table covered in antique & modern electronic sound-producing apparatus - harsh & unforgiving, but never letting the proceedings dip into a miasma of definition-free overload ... he kept the reins close at hand & the music thrived because of it ...
the next day a bunch of us were driving around on a particularly grim / grey sunday morning when john put on an unlabeled cd-r - plaintive, mainly pedal-steel based instrumentals ; nothing at all like the eno / b.j. cole collaborations but still suffused with sparkling electronics & a warm tonal bed ... sure enough, this was joe’s other side, recorded in the wee hours after marathon shifts tending bar as the city slept ...
flash forward a few months and here’s the first of what will hopefully be a long string of records by joe - this one nestled firmly between his two sides ; the pastoral minimalism of aggregate acoustic guitar patterns & whisper-quiet vocals comfortably adjoining thick swarms of analog drone & mysterious electro-acoustic activities - at once invigorating yet with a deeply ingrained sense of melancholy ...
joe’s on my short-list of people for whom i have high hopes (there’s an album on kranky coming in the near future) - seriously, don’t miss this one ... |
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kvist 002: web of light part i
info
artist: joe raglani to be released december 2007
description: noise and field recordings. the a side is comprised of a 12 minute monster with a guitar line, eerie chorus, and a fog of psychedelic folk noise. side b is spit into two tracks. the first track starts off loud and swirling before finding its peace at the end. track 2 is campfire concrčte.
...
about raglani
by mike ferrer.
raglani's use of analogue electronics is tied to traditional krautrock by a thread of dark romanticism extending, in germany, back to the work of caspar david friedrich. epic and tumultuous landscapes as images of psychic space; hazardous journeys through awesome and forbidding worlds; the hair-blown viewer looking down onto incredible canyons ... the entire extended metaphor of friedrich's work, linking the arc of a spiritual journey to the beautiful and tumultuous work of nature, is conserved in the work of the kosmische school.
raglani's relationship with the music of schulze or fricke is not 'retrospective,' but contemporary. the musical commonalities proceed from a shared commitment to the elaboration of exotic musical spaces, pursued chiefly through melody, adorned by figurative electronic flourishes and concrčte motifs. what is missed in alot of drone and noise is the ability of the sound to paint a scene; too often, we're presented with a blandly ecstatic wash of lo-fi murk, more stoned than psychedelic. raglani avoids these generic limitations by engaging more directly with the tradition to which his peers owe, arguably, the most considerable debt. what he deepens in that tradition is in the abstraction and development of themes -- spreading out the narrative through textural variation, rather than driving ever forward through arpeggios and circular rhythms. this might give him more in common with friedrich's wanderer above the sea of fog than with the cataclysm of his sea of ice; the voyage charted in raglani's of sirens born proceeds warily, but doesn't end in wreckage.
if raglani avoids the ascending freakouts of early kosmische music, however, it is because everyday life today is freaked out enough on its own. what is needed, rather, are sounds that can address our already-piqued uncertainty by involving it in a story it might recognize as its own. so there is little here, also, to tether raglani to the generic vibrations of noise and drone, though he uses some of the machines that make them; instead of any massive simultaneous display, secrets are revealed gradually and cumulatively. raglani's voice may sound familiar at first, and there is no doubting its context and sources, but the events described by his music trickle out in shapes, and at a pace, uniquely his. the scenes he composes, surreal but distinct, have all the luster of real paint. |
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