Artist : Hiss Tracts
Album : Shortwave Nights
Year : 2014
Genre : Ambient
Quality : 230kbps / 44.1KHz / Joint Stereo
Source : CD
Playtime : 0h 44m
Size : 78.28mb
Label : Constellation Records
Catalognr : CST104
Tracklist:
01. ...Shortwave Nights 8:07
02. Half-Speed Addict Starts With Broken Wollensak 3:57
03. Slowed Rugs 5:40
04. Drake Motel / "9 Gold Cadillacs" 1:16
05. Windpipe Gtrs. 3:38
06. Halo Getters 5:43
07. For The Transient Projectionist 5:18
08. Ahhh-Weee Dictaphone 0:40
09. Test Recording At Trembling City 7:17
10. Beijing-Bullhorn / Dopplered Light... 2:53
Releasenotes:
Shortwave Nights is the debut album by Hiss Tracts, a new duo featuring David
Bryant (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Set Fire To Flames) and Kevin Doria
(Growing, Total Life). The two met in 2004 and struck up a musical friendship
that led to three Growing records being made at The Pines (Bryant's recording
studio in Montreal) and a separate collaboration between the two, initially in
conjunction with experimental filmmaker Karl Lemieux (also GY!BE's current 16mm
auteur/projectionist). Rehearsal tapes from a set of sessions for a Lausanne
Underground Film Festival performance in 2008 became the foundation and starting
point for Hiss Tracts; David and Kevin continued working throughout 2009-2013,
but much of the material from their earliest session is still present, in one
state or another, within the tracks on this debut album.
The sonic preoccupations of Bryant and Doria are well-known and well-documented
across many highly acclaimed recordings over the past fifteen years, from the
organic, group-based, semi-improvised collage albums of Set Fire To Flames to
the glimmering, immersive minimalism of Growing and the more maximalist
full-spectrum noise works of Total Life. David and Kevin are instrumental music
practitioners of uncommon depth and intensity; Hiss Tracts opens new
collaborative, procedural and narrative pathways for these fine musicians to
continue exploring soundscape-based composition and production. Both are guitar
players, and the electric guitar figures as both recognizable and unrecognizable
source instrument on Shortwave Nights, but the deployment of a wide range of
additional analog sources and signals ensures that there is no confusing this
for a guitar-based drone, noise or post-rock record.
Shortwave Nights defies categorization by terms like "drone" or "ambient" and it
does not easily slip into any of the predominant subgenres that have
proliferated around studio-based soundscape work in recent years. Insofar as
drone is a touchstone, this has mostly to do with the approach to mixing, which
tends towards a transcendent/trance-inducing integration of elements into a
unified, saturated, wall-of-sound stereo field. The album contains no beats or
programming and very little that is identifiably loop-based or overtly sampled
and sampler-driven. Occasional deployments of digital signal processing remain
firmly in the service of Hiss Tract's overriding framework and commitment to
analog sources and human instrumentation. This is not an electronic record, nor
does it sit comfortably at either the pastoral or spooky/sinister poles of any
ambient or 'whatever'-wave spectrum; it can perhaps best be placed within the
broad lineages of post-industrial and musique concrΦte.
Meditative and visceral, humming with the electromagnetic atmosphere through
which all manner of frequencies, transmissions and surveillances pass and
collide, Shortwave Nights strikes an evocative balance between sonics
captured-channeled-harnessed vs. composed-sculpted-performed, with an almost
documentary rigour and restraint that nonetheless remains profoundly charged and
engaged. Constellation is thrilled to introduce this new project with a
brilliant debut album that has heavily infiltrated our brains and bloodstreams
since Bryant and Doria first played us the nearly-finished recordings in the
fall of 2013. Thanks for listening.
http://cstrecords.org/cst104/