The Squid's Ear Magazine


Mighty Cloud, The (Dave Quam / Joe Foster): Especially Songs (Sacred Realism)

An unusual journey in abstract sonic narrative and environments from Portland's Dave Quam (FKA Massacooramaan, Modern Melodies) and Seoul's Joe Foster (English, Don Brown and Dan Reynolds), their four pieces using concrete & acousmatic sources, field recordings, enigmatic errata and instrumental elements presented as sentences in sound that imply and defy intention; gripping.
 

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product information:

Personnel:



Dave Quam-composer, performer

Joe Foster-composer, performer


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Label: Sacred Realism
Catalog ID: SR012
Squidco Product Code: 30288

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2021
Country: Germany
Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold
Recorded in Seoul, Sorth Korea, and and Portland, Oregon, USA, in 2020 by Joe Foster and Dave Quam. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"Conjure in your mind's ear a conference room with a reverberation time of 0.6 seconds. Now forget all that because The Mighty Cloud creates an entirely alien sense of time, both collapsing and expanding acoustic behavior until your conference room is a parking structure, your childhood bathroom, the Voynich Manuscript, a field. A remarkably poetic debut of subtlety and finesse, the sound-worlds meticulously fabricated by Portland's Dave Quam (FKA Massacooramaan, Modern Melodies) and Seoul's Joe Foster (English, Don Brown and Dan Reynolds) on Especially Songs chart a course through meaning that lures the traveler into not one but many places, lives, beings, composers, movies, rabbit holes of both rodent and Youtube, and then feed the resulting itinerary into a Boltzmann machine, emerging from the process with something akin to divinity: a rest-stop strange loop where nothing is where you expect to find it but everything is in its proper (poetic) place.

Exquisite, if inscrutable, extensions of the electro-acoustic canon, the four pieces constituting Especially Songs leave this writer feeling he can't get enough. I mean, gimme more painstakingly sculpted scavenged and generic sounds! Gimme life!"- Dick Stormm, April 2021


Artist Biographies

Dave Quam (aka Desmond Barns, Massacooramaan) is a Portland, OR-based musician, multimedia artist and writer.

-Discogs (https://www.discogs.com/artist/2850186-Dave-Quam)
4/28/2025

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Joe Foster was born in California in 1972, lives in Seoul, and plays improvised music. His main collaborators have been J.P. Jenkins, Bryan Eubanks, Bonnie Jones (as the duo English), Hong Chulki, Choi Joonyong, Ryu Hankil, and Kevin Parks, but that's really not all. He's been in the groups Super Unity, Peevish, Don Brown and Dan Reynolds, and English, and has released CDRs, CDs, a USB, online stuff, and a cassette."

-Joe Foster Website (https://joefoster.wordpress.com/)
4/28/2025

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.


Track Listing:



1. Hard Problems/Soft Promises 23:17

2. The Great Paris Concert 4:33

3. Gripe Water (Utah Jazz) 16:51

4. Serenity Knolls 13:21

Related Categories of Interest:


Electro-Acoustic
Organized Sound and Sample Based Music
Field Recordings
Sound, Noise, &c.
Electroacoustic Composition
Duo Recordings
New in Experimental & Electronic Music

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Sacred Realism.


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