Music

Bhob Rainey: Two Bites of a Bitter Sweet - Download

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Chris Forsyth at Evolving Ear originally asked me to do an 8" lathe cut for his label.  I was hesitant for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that I had already consigned a number of pieces to the format fetish void (a 3" CDr, a split LP, download only, etc).  Still, I gave it some thought.  I had been working on a number of complex, large-scale pieces, some with Ralf Wehowsky, some for dance and film, others to who knows what ends, and I began to feel that the time and conceptual constraints of a "single" might be refreshing.  I convinced Chris to let me do a 7" instead of a lathe cut (I didn't need to go THAT lo-fi), and I set about making two formally related pieces with clear, simple trajectories; pop songs from a broken mind.  And that's sort of how it went.  The two sides of this release, "A Desert of Consolation" and "The Summering Unsound", both follow a singular form: an ambiguously intensifying exposition followed by an unfolding of previously hidden elements.  The materials, however, could not be more different:  "A Desert of Consolation" consists almost entirely of synthetic sounds lying in a narrow frequency band, while "The Summering Unsound" is made up of a good deal of untreated field recordings, beats, and broadband noise.  And, though I followed my dictum of simplicity in the pieces' trajectories, I couldn't stop myself from piling a lot of layers into the mix.  So, there's a simple, if perverse, horizontal unfolding, and a morass of detail vertically.  Kinda like a nice pile of fall leaves with a rake and skeleton hidden inside.  I should also mention that artist Elaine Kaufmann made the beautiful, hallucinatory covers for this release.  No photo would do them justice, as they play with real light in a way that's difficult to describe or reproduce.