Electronic / Experimental
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Over the past several years, the recorded output of Carl Stone has been turned on its head. In previous decades, Stone perennially toured new work but kept a harboring gulf of time between the live performances and their recorded release. This not only reflected the careful consideration of the pieces and technical innovations that went into the music but also the largely academic-minded audience that was themselves invested in the history and context of the work. The time span of Stone's recorded output in both sheer musical duration and year range was generously expansive. Following multiple historical overviews of Stone's work on Unseen Worlds and a re-connection with a wider audience, the time between Stone's new work in concert and on record has grown shorter and shorter until there is now almost no distance at all. Stone's work has often at its core explored new potential within popular cultural musics, simultaneously unspooling and satisfying a pop craving. On Stolen Car, the forms of Carl Stone's pieces have also become more compact, making for a progressive new stage in Stone's career where he is not only creating out of pop forms but challenging them.
Stolen Car is the gleeful, heart racing sound of hijack, hotwire, and escape. Stone carries the easy smirk and confidence of a car thief just out of the can, a magician in a new town setting up a game of balls and cups. With each track he reaches under the steering wheel and yanks a fistful of wires. Boom, the engine roars to life, the car speeds off into the sunset, the cups are tipped over, the balls, like the car, are gone.
"These tracks were all made in late 2019 and 2020, much of when I was in pandemic isolation about 5000 miles from my home base of Tokyo. All are made using my favorite programming language MAX. However distinct these two groupings might be they share some common and long-held musical concerns. I seek to explore the inner workings of the music we listen to using techniques of magnification, dissection, granulation,, anagramization, and others. I like to hijack the surface values of commercial music and re-purpose them offer a newer, different meaning, via irony and subversion." - Carl Stone, Los Angeles, September 2020

Unfortunately, passed away last year, and as a result, it became a posthumous work, but a masterpiece suitable as a true monument of a new era that connects to the horizon of Cosmicche Musik (= ambient music) -Ambient-New Age has appeared! Brooklyn's Experi is the latest album by Pauline Anna Strom, a naturally blind female electronic musician based in the Bay Area, who has made a mark in the history of synthesizer music. A dignified release from the great mental sanctuary



LTD stock from The Trilogy Tapes !! Adam Badí Donoval is the founder & curator of Warm Winters Ltd.

Black Truffle is pleased to announce Down On Darkened Meetings, the first solo release on the label from the quietly prolific Giuseppe Ielasi. Recorded at Ielasi’s studio in Monza outside of Milan over two days in February 2022, the seven pieces presented here continue the renewed exploration of the guitar that marks much of his solo work over the last few years. Emerging in the late 1990s as an improviser working primarily with prepared acoustic and electric guitars, the instrument became less prominent in his work over the next decade, ceding to loop-based constructs that would eventually split into abstracted takes on club music and hip-hop (including his work as Inventing Masks), on the one hand, and spectral electroacoustic explorations (such as the stunning triple disc 3 pauses), on the other. Returning to the guitar in recent years, he has approached the instrument as a source of shimmering metallic glissandi (Five Wooden Frames) or as the vehicle of elegiac double-tracked lines that feel almost like Frisell playing Feldman (The Prospect). Here the focus is on electric guitar filtered, looped, and splayed out into fields of irregular echoes through a bank of pedals.
Like many of Ielasi’s releases, Down On Darkened Meetings is structured as a set of short untitled pieces (here ranging between two and six minutes in length) that single-mindedly explore a single instrument or source throughout. The opening track immediately introduced the distinctive timbral world of fizzing, heavily filtered tones, chiming harmonics, and woozy looping bass figures inhabited throughout. At points it becomes near impossible to trace these sounds to the strings of an electric guitar; at others, as on the final two pieces, the instrument is unmistakable, as Ielasi builds up his shifting loops from snatches of almost unintentional sounding half-playing that give these closing tracks a hushed, private atmosphere reminiscent of Tolerance’s Anonym. While the repeating chords and hanging melodic figures present on many tracks call to mind earlier Ielasi classics like Gesine and Untitled, here the music feels less meticulously constructed than played: Ielasi’s lyrical guitar lines obscured by a battery of effects at times come across like a dilated take on the outer-fringe fretwork of improvisers like Henry Kaiser and Raymond Boni, and the muddy, asynchronous fields of pops and hiss at times wander into areas reminiscent of the hand-played dub techno of Vladislav Delay’s Multila.
Like much of Ielasi’s work in recent years, these seven pieces perform a delicate balancing act: between abstraction and immediacy, austerity and abundance. Imbued with Ielasi’s distinctive lightness of touch, considered approach to pacing, and subtly psychedelic approach to the stereo field, Down on Darkened Meetings is a major new work from a quiet master of contemporary experimental music.


Written and produced by Laurel Halo
Mixed by Cole MGN
Mastered by Jason Goz at Transition
Laurel Halo - Piano, synth, vibraphone, guitaret, vocals
Eli Keszler - Drum kit, dumbek, glockenspiel
Max D - Cowbell (Jelly)
Klein - Vocals (Sun to Solar, Jelly)
Lafawndah - Vocals (Jelly, Syzygy)
Michael Salu - Vocals (Who Won?)
Craig Clouse - Wurlitzer (Who Won?, Syzygy, Like an L, Do U Ever Happen)
Julia Holter - Cello (Do U Ever Happen)
Michael Beharie - Electric guitar (Moontalk)
Diamond Terrifier - Tenor saxophone (Arschkriecher, Who Won?)
“Sun to Solar” lyrics adapted from “Servidão de Passagem” by Haroldo de Campos (Something Else Press / Primary Information)
This recording was made at and with the support of the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.
Album design by Bureau Mirko Borsche
Photography by Phillip Aumann
