0 of 0 (Static Works Vol. 1)
March 19th, 2019
Hey everyone. I’m super underslept today and writing this on my phone from my living room. How are you all?
I’ve got a new album available over on the subscriber page, the sixth in the subscriber series. I’m a few days late with this one, but today is the spring equinox, so the timing is a little fortuitous.
0 of 0 (Static Works Vol. 1) is nine and a half hours of static pieces – that is, tracks where no changes occur. (Remember harsh noise wall? Like that.) I wrote these between 2015 and 2016, then recently touched them up and organized them into themes. I was interested in finding the edges of what can constitute stasis, and how much change can actually happen in a piece before we no longer perceive it as one static sound.
0 of 0 isn’t really something to be listened to in one go (tho I won’t tell you how to live your life). It’s more like an installation piece. You just sit with it for a bit at a time.
It’s divided into a few sections, as follows:
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Open Pieces
The loud ones. Open like a faucet, or the throttle of a car engine.
Pulse Pieces
These use repetition of a single sound with a beginning and an end to create stasis, rather than a continuous sound with no temporal features.
Membrane Pieces
These ones feel to me like the piece has two layers – a membrane on top, and another pushing (seeping?) through it. The membrane “looks” uneven up close, but if you unfocus your eyes it quickly becomes uniform.
Evolving Pieces
These pieces ask how long a transition must be before stasis is no longer perceived.
Small Pieces
A pleasant ending after all this mess.
Closed Pieces
Barely there. Most speakers will not play these tracks at all.
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Thanks, as always, for listening. Happy spring.
B
Lapse
February 24th, 2019
Hi everyone, hope you’re doing ok. I’ve got a new tape on the subscriber channel today.
This one’s from my group Esther Chlorine, with the inimitable Greg Gorlen (of Black Thread, Vibrating Garbage, et. al.). This one was recorded in early 2015 in SF. I was playing a baritone guitar I’d just purchased in Portland OR while wandering down the coast, which was then run through Greg’s feral system of busted cassette tape loops – sometimes running eight loops of varying length at a time.
The result is a spare, evolving set of downer headphone tracks that I hope you’ll dig as much as we enjoyed playing them.
Take care, see you in three weeks.
Eulogy for Land
February 3rd, 2019
Hi all. Hope you’ve been staying warm. NY was a motherfucker for a couple days there, but today it feels like spring is here.
Here’s the fourth entry in this subscriber series I’ve been working on. It’s been a rapid pace, but it feels sustainable for now. My aim with these subscriber releases is to have something nice to listen to every three weeks. Normally I would be publishing these as cassettes and sending out promo copies and all that – just that, for now, the flow of ideas is outpacing my capacity for administrative work. Happens, right?
Eulogy for Land is a lengthy, funereal piece, born from anxiety about our actually literally impending global ecological collapse, and the accompanying Holocene extinction. It was written and performed in an evening using a baritone guitar (beginning), a contact mic (middle), and an acoustic guitar (end). It’s extremely spare – musically there’s no loud, scary moves here. It’s something you can fall asleep to (if you like thinking about this stuff while you’re trying to get to sleep lol).
If you haven’t checked out the subscription series yet, I think you’ll dig it. It’s three bucks a month – the price of a cup of coffee. You get downloads of all my previous albums, plus a steady stream of subscriber-only releases like this one. (Disclaimer: some of these might see releases on other labels some day but there’s no plans presently.)
Thanks for listening. See you in three weeks.
take care,
Brendan
