Villages - Procession Acts (Bathetic, 2015)

The decade long evolution of Villages (William Ross Gentry) has been a fascinating one. It's been a privilege to watch this personality unfurl. At an impressive fifteen releases, each has growth that is very apparent, one that is indicative of hard work, and a discerning ear.

His initial offering, the lovely and delicate "The Last Whole Earth" in 2010, seems homage to his heroes, a cold yet delicate droning piece that calls to mind artists such as Eno, Stars of the Lid, and Labradford. As his palatte refined, Villages moved in a less ambient / drone direction. At each moment, there is a subtle maturity. The Spilling Past showed leaps and bounds in production, Theories of Ageing sees a shift, not only to cinematic frontier, but a more rhythmic direction with clean piano, acoustic guitar, and banjo, signifying an attempt to distinguish his motif as an accessible music separate from the drone genre. He escaped the pigeon hole only to be dubbed "Appalachian Drone" by several writers.

With "Procession Acts", the ten year oeuvre seems to reach a pinnacle of emotion and individual characteristics. with a production excellence that would inspire all who make music themselves.

If you're a fan of classical music, you know that often it is possible to recognize imagery and incidents the writer was contemplating during the creative process. Gentry's subtleties and nuances are full forward, and he wears his influences on his sleeve: Jonny Greenwood, Cliff Martinez, and Nick Cave & Warren Ellis scores, Type Records artists such as Peter Broderick and Goldmund, western guitar drone and blues from Steven R. Smith to Mississippi John Hurt. All of these elements combine to make a perfect album, and the culmination of an excellent repertoire.

Act One

Beginnings in Dust
Devouring the Whole
The Luddite
Tell the Butcher
Coat of Arms
Pillars in Half Light

Act Two

Open in Reverse
Out of the Mines
Predecessors
Slow Successors
Endings in Rust

Purchase your copy from the wonderful Bathetic Records HERE. Vinyl will go fast!!!

Stream on Spotify HERE.

Listen to a mix he made of his influences for the latest album HERE

The Wind-up Bird - S/T (Alone, 2002)

The Wind-up Bird, Joseph Grimm, is a contemporary multimedia experimental composer. I know of him thanks to Vincent's Ear (legendary Asheville, NC nightclub, show ca 2002). This is a truly important album in my life, launching an obsessive interest in ambient / drone / experimental A/V hybrids.

His installation concept comes to life before your eyes and ears creating near synesthesia. Swirling sounds of looped violin, guitar and trumpet delicately create drones of beautiful and cinematic melancholy. 16mm projections snake around the room, enhancing the sanctuary that is his ghostly narrative. This music offers passionate and heartbreaking moods unparalleled by most other modern ambient motifs, in a hyper-sensory experience. As striking as it is subtle, the album is high on my list of all time favorites.

His artist statement:

My medium, properly understood, is not objects in space; nor is it light and sound. Instead I interrogate the human body’s psycho-sensory apparatus, exposing its blind spots, glitches, errors. Taking sense experience as my canvas, I make work that exposes the support; I show where the canvas ends. In my recent performance and installation work, I use modified 16mm projectors, sans film. Micro-controllers algorithmically vary the speed of the projectors’ motors. At slow speeds, the shutter’s passing before the bulb generates intense flickering patterns. But as motors accelerate, flickers become so fast that they disappear to the human eye. At this threshold, ephemeral forms with unexpected color and movement are generated by the viewer's body. In certain pieces, I use handmade electronics to translate these shifting light patterns into sound waves which are at times audible, but at other times ultrasonic or infrasonic. Projecting into corners and onto domestic fan blades, I create illusions of dimension and motion that paradoxically negate illusion, prompting the viewer to negotiate a direct, problematized confrontation with space, matter, and time: what you see is not what there is. To encounter an artwork that exists partially beyond sensory thresholds is to face the limits of one’s ability to apprehend the ontologically real. When a phenomenon like sound vibration or flickering light moves back and forth across the border between the perceptible and the imperceptible, the fragility of the body is exposed in its limited ability to know its physical surroundings. Through this experience, I hope viewers will obliquely access the ultimately inaccessible world of things in themselves. I make art that, in Jean-Francois Lyotard's words, "bears witness to the incommensurability between thought and the real world."

More at his Website.