horaflora - The Gland Canyon
Soon to be re-released in an edition of 50 as part of the "installation" series, this is the cumulation of my first 5 years of playing and recording electronic and improvised music. The disc is 80 minutes long, and is a continuous work, though has been split into 5 sections that are defined only by the track splitting on the CD, which I did to facilitate playback/browsing and in order to use several track titles that I'd bandied about through the years! Previous editions have had different numbers of tracks (13, 3, 1) as they were created.
The album consists of many different layered solo, duo, and trio improvisations and field recordings from 2002 - 2007.
Nearly everything was close mic'd, late at night, with binaural microphones; thus a vividly present sound is inherent throughout the proceedings. The late night sessions made for great isolation in each source (no traffic or street noise), as well as the extra-spacial bent allowing each sound to sit in it's own space without interfering with other sources that eventually became it's partners in time! The cumulative effect of such nonsense is a heightened spacial illusion for the listener where not only do the sounds appear to be in the room with him/her (provided headphones are employed upon playback) but that all of the sounds were played together in a room at the same time, perhaps by an improvising ensemble all gathered closely around a stereo mic....
...Though what this ensemble would be playing would be extremely difficult to assemble in one room, and fit around one microphone! Some of the sounds were sourced from old creaky playground equipment, industrial water diffusers (part of a huge shower-head, basically a cymbal with holes), a chinese instrument shop on a quiet day, my family singing christmas carols as I walk up from the basement, as well as a lot of other instruments... homemade granular synthesis sampler, french horn, sax, flute, voice, lots of ebow'd objects (previously mentioned showerhead, mbira tine, toy harp...), custom cell phone rings modulated by mouth cavities, vietnamese woodblocks, egg slicers, ceiling fan, book pages, circuit bent budda box, answering machine message fed back through skype connection, guinea pig, broken hard drive, turntable belt drive motor, music boxes, bone resonator hearing test device, mineral water (gerolsteiner) fizz slowly escaping through the cap which is a little wet, rubbed trampoline, toy piano, and... harmonica! None of the aforementioned instruments were played "properly", though... except for the guinea pig. The guinea pig was unprepared.
All of these recordings were then arranged on computer in early 2007 during which time my recording situation was hampered by a loud refrigerator hum from a cafe below the apartment I had moved into that year, the hum was omnipresent throughout the apartment 24/7 and made it's way into the last track as one of the last recordings I made before settling down to edit and arrange the whole thing into it's present day form.
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