A gorgeous album of acoustic improvisation from Anthony Pateras performing on a prepared piano and Stephen O'Malley on steel string acoustic guitar, recorded live with no overdubs during O'Malley's residency at La Becque on Lake Geneva in the summer of 2021, slowly interacting through resonant harmonics and percussive tones that glide and fill the air with contemplative sound.
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Sample The Album:
Stephen O'Malley-acoustic guitar
Anthony Pateras-piano
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Llimited double LP with an etching on fourth side, housed in printed heavyweight inner and outer sleeves.
UPC: 769791984820
Label: SHELTER PRESS
Catalog ID: SHELTER 146LP
Squidco Product Code: 33946
Format: 2 LPs
Condition: New
Released: 2023
Country: France
Packaging: Double LP in single Sleeve
Recorded live at La Becque, Switzerland, in September 2021.
"Sept duos pour guitar acoustique et piano préparé is the second duo recording from Stephen O'Malley and Anthony Pateras. Their first together, Rêve Noir (2018), took an electro-acoustic scalpel to a 2011 duo concert for electric guitar and piano, using Revox and digital treatments to twist and smear gig documentation into ghostly echoes and fractured drones. Here, in contrast, the music is entirely acoustic and presented as it was performed, without overdubs. Both players' choices of instruments are notable: this is O'Malley's most extensive recording on steel string acoustic guitar (playing an instrument whose previous owners include Marissa Nadler and Glenn Jones) and Pateras return to the prepared piano, which he has rarely employed in recent years, after spending much of the first decade of the 21st century exploring its possibilities.
Recorded during O'Malley's residency at La Becque on Lake Geneva in the summer of 2021, from the first moments of the opening 'déjà revé' the music immediately establishes the distinctive landscape of chiming tones and hovering clouds of resonance explored throughout its one-hour running time. Pateras' preparations create tolling bell-like tones alive with complex overtones, alongside which O'Malley's open strings and natural harmonics add a sparkling clarity. While Pateras' music often uses a densely chromatic harmonic language, these duos are remarkable for their modal simplicity. However, the interaction between the pure intervals of O'Malley's just-intoned strings and the unstable harmonies created by the piano preparations suspends the music in an oneiric state of hazy ambiguity. Without obvious reference to tempo or meter, the music floats in what the composer Ernstalbrecht Stiebler has called a 'bottomless sound space', the temporal placement of events determined by bodily rhythms and the performers' own listening to (and enjoyment of) the sounds being made.
Heard one way, this music can seem striking in its consistency, almost environmental. Attending more carefully, the listener hears the pitch sets and tunings changing throughout the album's length. Each piece has its own character, subtly distinguished from the others through mood, pacing, and timbre. On 'déjà voulu', for instance, O'Malley makes prominent use of slide, the woozy, bending pitches weaving through a series of lush arpeggiated chords from the piano. 'Déjà senti', on the other hand, is particularly spare, the gestures spaced out to the extent that they often float in isolation against the background of fading resonance. Much of 'déjà su' is built around a slowly pulsing single prepared piano tone, creating an almost ominous tension, whereas the sparkling guitar harmonics and arpeggios of the closing 'déjà raconté' have a gently triumphal air. While the music's calm, rippling surface is immediately entrancing, these seven duos - in the tradition of the best improvised music - also reward close listening, which reveals sonic details and focuses the listener's attention on how the music unfolds spontaneously from decision to decision, from gesture to gesture.
Recorded during a period when O'Malley and Pateras were grieving the loss of recently departed friends and collaborators, these seven duos possess a reflective, at times almost mournful quality. More importantly, though, they are imbued with other qualities that can arise from personal loss: a clarity that allows one to clear away the inessential, to begin again, to renew one's faith in friendship and music."-Shelter Press
Llimited double LP with an etching on fourth side, housed in printed heavyweight inner and outer sleeves.
Artist Biographies
• Show Bio for Stephen O'Malley "Stephen O'Malley (sometimes referred to as SOMA)[1] is a guitarist, producer, composer, and visual artist from Seattle, Washington who has conceptualized and participated in numerous drone doom, death/doom, and experimental music groups (the most notable of which is Sunn O)))). O'Malley is a founding member of several groups including Sunn O))) (1998-present), Burning Witch (1995-1998), KTL (2005-present), and Khanate (2000-2006). Within these groups and alone, he has collaborated with a variety of artists including Greg Anderson, Merzbow, Eyvind Kang, Alan Moore, Iancu Dumitrescu, Ana-Maria Avram, F.M. Einheit, Randall Dunn, James Plotkin, Julian Cope, Joe Preston, Attila Csihar, Stuart Dempster, Peter Rehberg aka PITA, Lee Dorrian, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Nurse With Wound, the Japanese metal band Boris & Michio Kurihara, Jim O'Rourke, Keiji Haino, Daniel O'Sullivan & Kristoffer Rygg (in the free improvisation act Æthenor together with Steve Noble), Aaron Turner, Oren Ambarchi, Alexander Tucker, and percussionist Z'EV.[2] O'Malley also produced work together with the French choreographer and theatre director Gisèle Vienne (the pieces "Kindertotenlieder" (2007), "Jerk" (2008), "Eternelle Idole" (2009), This Is How You Will Disappear (2010)),[3] Last Spring: A Prequel (2011), American sculptor Banks Violette (various projects between 2005-2009), the Italian performance artist Nico Vascellari (2007-2011), Swiss art collective KLAT (2009), and the Belgian film maker Alexis Destoop ("Kairos" (2010), with Oren Ambarchi). O'Malley has directed and produced album cover art and design since the early 1990s for groups including Earth, Burzum, Emperor, Melvins and Boris. He has also worked as a rock/metal music journalist & published a black metal fanzine called Descent in the nineties. He was involved with creation of both the Southern Lord[4] label and the experimental/neofolk/black metal label The Ajna Offensive.[5] In 2011 he began curating and art directing the Ideologic Organ record label, in association with the Viennese Editions Mego. Although he is originally from Seattle, O'Malley's Web site indicates that he lives in Paris, France." ^ Hide Bio for Stephen O'Malley • Show Bio for Anthony Pateras "Anthony Pateras is a composer and pianist. His works have been performed by The BBC Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Toronto Symphony, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Brett Dean, Jessica Aszodi as well as a large body of work for percussion by Synergy, Speak Percussion, Slagwerkgroep Den Haag, Vanessa Tomlinson, Diego Espinosa and the percussionists of the Basel Symphony. Pateras is the producer/songwriter for tetema, a quartet with vocalist Mike Patton and frequent collaborators Will Guthrie (drums) and Erkki Veltheim (violin). Anthony has also performed concerts with Stephen O'Malley, Han Bennink, Paul Lovens, The Necks, eRikM, Valerio Tricoli, Anthony Burr, and has a working trio with Veltheim and trumpet virtuoso Scott Tinkler entitled North of North. He has been commissioned by Radio France, SWR2 Baden-Baden, Melbourne Symphony, Kitchen Orchestra Stavanger, Muzzix Lille, Richard Tognetti, Lampo Chicago, Jérôme Noetinger, the National Gallery of Lithuania and Ensemble Hiatus through the French Ministry of Culture. Pateras was the composer-in-residence at the Australian National Academy of Music in 2010, was nominated twice for the UNESCO Rostrum of Composers (2004, 2011) and is a recipient of the 2014 Myer Creative Fellowship. Anthony has released over 30 albums on Tzadik, Editions Mego, Ipecac and on his own Immediata label. He holds a PhD in composition from Monash University, which explores intersections between composition, improvisation and electro-acoustic music." ^ Hide Bio for Anthony Pateras
9/9/2024
Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.
9/9/2024
Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.
Track Listing:
SIDE A
1. Deja Reve 10:00
2. Deja Vecu 09:42
SIDE B
1. Deja Voulu 08:18
2. Deja Senti 06:40
3. Deja Su 04:44
SIDE V
1. Deja Trouve 10:14
2. Deja Raconte 11:12
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