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CONCERT SILENCE - 9.22.07 [2-3 P.M.]

Format: CD Label & Cat.Number: Infraction INFX 042 Release Year: 2010 Note: debut album of promising ambient electronica duo from Portland, OR; oversized mini-gatefold sleeve Price (incl. 19% VAT): €13.00 More Info "Concert Silence is a collaboration between Charles Buckingham and Matthew Cooper, currently both residing in Portland, Oregon. An ongoing conversation between the two began in 2004 when they met over a shared interest in live sound manipulation. 09.22.07 was the first major outcome of discussions regarding symbiotic cultures and their implications to music. A live performance set up was designed, allowing each player to have equal input and manipulation control, (which can be seen in a diagram within the artwork of the album). After the completion of a live session recorded to minidisc, the two decided to release the unmastered un-edited music for free download via their website. A short while later the free recordings were taken down from the site. Infraction Records is now releasing a previously unheard professionally mastered recording of the session in its entirety. Housed in a 6 panel cardstock folder." [label info] "The sound of piano, both pure and processed, has become almost a sub-genre of its own within ambient electronica. There's a Satie-authored lineage stretching from Budd/Eno through to Sakamoto's collabs with Alva Noto and Fennesz, with signs to other off-beat sites. Buckingham's background in visual art makes his contribution to Concert Silence somewhat enigmatic. He had previously co-opted Cooper for the audio of an online ambient audio-visual collaboration in the Window Exchange project; Cooper's signature is clearly recognizable, for all that the pianism of his earlier Eluvium work are tweaked and tampered with here. Six discrete movements, an affair of edgy ambience, with lilting lulling passages ceding to digital depredations. Some parts subtly infiltrated, others strewn with the detritus of error-smithery. 'Part Two,' for example, sounds as if it's slowly spontaneously combusting in the player, gradually growing into a larger conflagration, culminating in a veritable firework display of pops, crackles and wayward woozy pitch shifts, eating itself in echo and fuzz, before returning to the opening lull of barely audible soft-pedaled piano purism. Overall the Cooper-Buckingham pairing puts a distinctive slant on the compositional tradition mentioned above, finding a beguiling blend of the worlds of piano concerto and that of digital signal processing, with its random reversals, glitch flurries, and drone. Yet, for all its peculiarities of pitch and microsonic mist, strong melodic lines serve as binding, stiched together, lending poise to noise. " [Alan Lockett] www.infractionrecords.com