 Each release is a one-time vinyl pressing and will be housed in a letterpress band (designed by Bryan Christopher Baker) that will vary with each installment (each will also be available in the vastly inferior digital format). These LPs will also include artwork and assorted ephemera that invoke our deepest respect for the medium and the hand-crafted (and assembled) components we regret have disappeared with the rise of digital media. R/W terminates after ten installments.
AMI 032 R/W ENSEMBLE ECONOMIQUE Standing Still, Facing Forward LP
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AMI 031 R/W
SON OF EARTH
Improvements LP
Side A
Side B
While still being filled with the unease and tension that is their hallmark, Improvements is the first record that also allows the humor and camaraderie between the members of Son of Earth to come to the fore. Most of their previous releases have been culled from live recordings, and the group has always thrived on the tension of live performance. Earlier studio efforts, such as the acclaimed Pet LP, though recorded at home, were composed in an everyone-has-to-be-serious approximation of the live performance experience. This time, possibly for the first time, in a sweaty little room, and in a stairwell, and in a back yard tossing horseshoes in Holyoke, Massachusetts, the group finally dropped all pretense - not of seriousness, but of obligation to some unseen spectator. On Improvements, you can really hear John Shaw, Matt Krefting, and Aaron Rosenblum being themselves, and being Son of Earth and it's weird. Manchester-bred, Rick Myers, who has worked with John Cale, Andy Votel, Dinosaur Jr. and Badly Drawn Boy and has created books with Nieves Zurich & Gladtree Press to name a few, provides the beautiful art / design-work for the LP jackets. LP comes wrapped in letter-pressed band and contains a 16-page art book.
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AMI 032 R/W
ENSEMBLE ECONOMIQUE
Standing Still, Facing Forward LP
Side A
Side B
The primary step in understanding Standing Still, Facing Forward is to recognize Ensemble Economique is Brian Pyle. Brian Pyle is Ensemble Economique. This is the first LP release from Ensemble Economique. Digitalis issued the At the Foot of Nameless Roads CD in 2008. Ensemble Economique's fantastic earliest recording, entitled No GPS, was bundled as a CDr with a limited initial pressing of At the Foot, but has yet to be properly issued. Both recordings are important primers to Pyle's nascent invocations of Holger Czukay's Cannaxis (on No GPS) and Karlheinz Stockhausen's Kontake (on At the Foot). With Standing Still, Facing Forward Ensemble Economique provides the most mature realization of Pyle's compositional process, which utilizes found sounds, field recordings, and musical performance that he later meticulously edits, layers, and loops in the studio. The effects of these processes are dramatic, cinematic and conceptually rigorous and this recording evidences Pyle as an important new composer emerging out of the long and storied tradition of West Coast experimentalism. Utilizing a delicate combination of the homespun improvisation of his other project, Starving Weirdos (whose work sounds like an American echo of AMM) with his own unique variation on the European avant-garde in Ensemble Economique, Pyle's practice involves a dense approach to composition akin to assemblage. But unlike electronic and laptop composition, Pyle's studio work aims to re-establish an organicism associated with live (or, in the case of the field recordings, lived) performance that pushes the studio out into nature and nature into the studio. In short, the Northern Californian landscape plays an integral part in Ensemble Economique's soundscapes, and this record captures much of the atmosphere of Pyle's home terrain.
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