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dandeacon · 7 years ago

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SPIDERMAN OF THE RINGS: In 2007 I had no ID, no cell phone, no bank account, no computer, no credit card, no money, and thought there was no actual future. But I had friends. Those friends helped me through a time in my life that could have gone in several awful directions, but with them, I went down a very strange, beautiful and colorful journey that, in many ways, solidified 10 years ago with the release of ‘Spiderman of The Rings.’

SMOTR was written mostly on a roommates desktop computer while he was at work. The album was recorded on a borrowed laptop and with a borrowed microphone in my bedroom within a warehouse when the person on the other side of the wall wasn’t playing the drums (which was insanely often). Beyond those huge tangible favors, what the community of friends I had and new people I was meeting in Baltimore gave to me was a massive inspiration and encouragement that seemed unique to this place and that time.

When I first started making computer music, I was making it for myself to pass the time, more like a video game than a studio practice. The idea of other people listening to it seemed like a fantasy and I thought there was no way to perform it. That slowly changed in college at Purchase, being around so many artists and different people constantly working, seeing so much work always on display. It inspired me to want to share my work and to make it of a quality worth sharing. Upon moving to Baltimore in 2004, the energy from college was concentrated in the small group of friends I moved here with and amplified by the energy and creative fervor felt throughout Baltimore. My first few years in Baltimore shaped the musician I was to become in ways I could not have foreseen.

I fell in love with the American DIY and the absurd optimist nihilism I felt in it. The world was going to end in 2012 so we might as well party our way into the apocalypse. Every second was lived in the moment and the entire world was summed up in a tiny warehouse or basement of whatever city I was in that night. I was a fool. An ignorant, ecstatic fool.

The first indication that SMOTR was going to be a turning point for me as a musician was when the album “leaked” a few months prior to its released. This was hilarious to me. Before this, I could barely give my music away for free and now people were “stealing” it. It made me so happy. The leak found its way to a Radiohead message board that started having the first real conversations about the album. Prior to this, I had never really encountered anyone hearing my music without seeing me perform. From that leaked and the work that Carpark was doing, my music reached more people than I could ever have dreamed of. It completely changed my life in every possible way.

ULTIMATE REALITY: There is no one else in my life that I have collaborated more frequently with than Jimmy Joe Roche. We met in college, became fast friends and have lived like arcane idiots ever since. His psychedelic images have always inspired me. In our college dorm room, our computers would be setup side by side. It was almost a competition to see who could work the most on them. His work ethic and push for originality were major inspirations and source of drive in me.

When Jimmy moved in with me in Baltimore in 2006 I had just begun working on some new music for a project with two of my favorite humans and drummers, Jeremy Hymen and Kevin O'Meara. They were my two favorite musicians in Baltimore, amazingly creative drummers who put their all into their playing and displayed it both in the sounds and with physicality of their movements. They both looked like they were exploding and contracting back infinitely as speeds that baffled me. I very much wanted to write a piece of music for the two of them to perform together. This started with 'Ultimate Reality (movement 3).’

Jimmy came home when we were rehearsing in the living room and immediately asked what we’re doing and if he could collaborate with us visually on the project. His involvement brought the project into a context that allowed it to be real. Before this, I had no idea how this piece of music would exist, now suddenly, it was real.

This collaboration awoke in me my desire to write music for other other musicians. Musicians of amazing skill and ability. This project was steer my music in a totally new direction. Ultimate Reality was what helped steer me towards Bromst, America and was the seed that brought about collaborations with Sō Percussion and the Kronos Quartet.

Ultimate Reality came out in late 2007, a few months after Spiderman of the Rings. The score of Ultimate Reality was always linked to the live performance or with the visuals on DVD. It was never released as a standalone score until this release. It makes me really happy to have SMOTR and Ultimate Reality paired together for the release. Both those projects marked major turning points in my life as a musician. Looking back SMOTR and Ultimate Reality were opposite side of the same door that I was passing through. There could not have been one without the other.

IN CLOSING: All the original files and session for SMOTR and Ultimate Reality have been lost time to time. There will never be a re-master or re-mixing of the album or the score. At first, this really bummed me out. But slowly it not only started to make sense but make me happy. It reminded me of how I lived and who I was 10+ years ago when I was making the album. I never thought there would be a reason to archive those files, to keep track of old computers or hard drives. Plus even if I had, I wouldn’t have had a means of doing so. It feels appropriate that they are frozen in time, mixed in the red, maxed out at all levels at all times for all time. I recorded them in the same way a photograph is taken, to document a moment in time. I didn’t plan on losing the ability to remaster or remix the Spiderman of the Rings, but I also didn’t plan on anything else associated with it or my career to happen to it seems perfect and poetic that it’s impossible.

I’d like to deeply thank anyone and everyone that’s ever taken the time to listen to any of music. It still blows me away to know that with such a massive wealth of music we live with some people choose the time to spend their time listening to mine. I can’t thank you enough for that. Thank you to my friends and family that have kept me alive and going and continue to inspire me and push me. I’d like to thank two specific individuals. Todd at Carpark for, despite knowing I was completely insane, believing in my music and giving me a chance to share it with the world. And thank you to Sam Hunt who thankfully didn’t know I was completely insane but, upon learning so, continued to help me deeply explore my love of performing and touring through a deep collaboration on whatever logically and logistically impractical concept I approach him with.

OK, sorry for this long winded sentimental nonsense. This music means a lot to me and it means everything that it means anything to you. Thank you again so infinitely much. I’ll keep making my weird music as long as I’m able with hopes that it’ll reach anyone and make them smile, inspired or want to have a party.

Peace, your pal dan

'Spiderman Of the Rings’ (Deluxe 10th Anniversary Edition Including Ultimate Reality) is out now!

—- Stream/DL: smarturl.it/smotr10_dsps Limited vinyl: smarturl.it/smotr10_vmp Limited cassettes: smarturl.it/smotr10_carpark Limited merch: bit.ly/smotr10_merch

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dannydeek · 7 years ago

Text

SMOTR was written mostly on a roommates desktop computer while he was at work. The album was recorded on a borrowed laptop and with a borrowed microphone in my bedroom within a warehouse when the person on the other side of the wall wasn't playing the drums (which was insanely often). Beyond those huge tangible favors, what the community of friends I had and new people I was meeting in Baltimore gave to me was a massive inspiration and encouragement that seemed unique to this place and that time.

The first indication that SMOTR was going to be a turning point for me as a musician was when the album "leaked" a few months prior to its released. This was hilarious to me. Before this, I could barely give my music away for free and now people were "stealing" it. It made me so happy. The leak found its way to a Radiohead message board that started having the first real conversations about the album. Prior to this, I had never really encountered anyone hearing my music without seeing me perform. From that leaked and the work that Carpark was doing, my music reached more people than I could ever have dreamed of. It completely changed my life in every possible way.

IN CLOSING: All the original files and session for SMOTR and Ultimate Reality have been lost time to time. There will never be a re-master or re-mixing of the album or the score. At first, this really bummed me out. But slowly it not only started to make sense but make me happy. It reminded me of how I lived and who I was 10+ years ago when I was making the album. I never thought there would be a reason to archive those files, to keep track of old computers or hard drives. Plus even if I had, I wouldn't have had a means of doing so. It feels appropriate that they are frozen in time, mixed in the red, maxed out at all levels at all times for all time. I recorded them in the same way a photograph is taken, to document a moment in time. I didn't plan on losing the ability to remaster or remix the Spiderman of the Rings, but I also didn't plan on anything else associated with it or my career to happen to it seems perfect and poetic that it's impossible.

I'd like to deeply thank anyone and everyone that's ever taken the time to listen to any of music. It still blows me away to know that with such a massive wealth of music we live with some people choose the time to spend their time listening to mine. I can't thank you enough for that. Thank you to my friends and family that have kept me alive and going and continue to inspire me and push me. I'd like to thank two specific individuals. Todd at Carpark for, despite knowing I was completely insane, believing in my music and giving me a chance to share it with the world. And thank you to Sam Hunt who thankfully didn't know I was completely insane but, upon learning so, continued to help me deeply explore my love of performing and touring through a deep collaboration on whatever logically and logistically impractical concept I approach him with.

OK, sorry for this long winded sentimental nonsense. This music means a lot to me and it means everything that it means anything to you. Thank you again so infinitely much. I'll keep making my weird music as long as I'm able with hopes that it'll reach anyone and make them smile, inspired or want to have a party.

Peace, your pal dan

'Spiderman Of the Rings' (Deluxe 10th Anniversary Edition Including Ultimate Reality) is out now!

---- Stream/DL: smarturl.it/smotr10_dsps Limited vinyl: smarturl.it/smotr10_vmp Limited cassettes: smarturl.it/smotr10_carpark Limited merch: bit.ly/smotr10_merch

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ricardosousalemos · 8 years ago

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Sade: Love Deluxe

In the mid-’80s, a new kind of jazz-pop emerged in the UK, mostly assembled by former members of post-punk and new wave bands. They blended jazz, bossa nova, soul, and some of the swollen negative space of dub into a sleek and buoyant composite. The sound was streamlined and modern, inasmuch as anything that scans as “modern” is just an effectively redesigned past. It was initially embodied in records by Working Week, the Style Council, Everything But the Girl, and—the only band included in this brief genre that, as of 2017, still records and plays together—Sade.

Sade began as a reduced lineup of the Latin jazz band Pride. Stuart Matthewman auditioned for Pride after reading an ad in a magazine seeking a saxophone player for a “fashion conscious jazz-funk band.” At the audition, he met Sade Adu, then one of Pride’s backup singers; after Matthewman joined the band, he and Adu started writing together. As Pride eventually fragmented, the band Sade solidified, with the final lineup including bassist Paul Denman and keyboardist Andrew Hale. During the sessions for their first record, Diamond Life, they would listen to Gil Scott-Heron, Marvin Gaye, and Nina Simone, and try to synthesize the sounds into a more seamless design. Often the mixture would produce crisp staircases of soul, like “Your Love Is King,” or liquid-crystal pop-funk, like “Hang on to Your Love.” Sometimes they slipped into a less material space; in live performances of the Diamond Life B-side “Love Affair With Life,” Hale’s piano, Matthewman’s saxophone, and Adu’s voice are held together by the song’s vast margins, given a ghostly shape by its silences. They were capable of producing a floating, haunted kind of music, and over time their attentions and their albums grew more absorbed by it. Just two albums later, on 1988’s Stronger Than Pride, songs like “I Never Thought I’d See the Day” and “Love Is Stronger Than Pride” seem to flow out of and recede back into a gently-constructed nowhere.

As their first U.S. Top 10 hit “Smooth Operator” described the jet-setting lifestyle of a debonair, dangerous, Don Juan-type, Sade came to signify a kind of cosmopolitan exotica—where one could travel to distant places on luxury airplanes, absorb an endless, glossy flow of champagne, and slowly sift through a hangover in a hotel bar. Their music was a portal through which one could effortlessly simulate such an experience, a virtual vacation in which the more severe physical edges of reality had been dissolved. Sade had also acquired, through their numerous love songs, the reputation of a generally romantic band. In reality, Adu’s songs are less romantic in form than they are glassy vehicles for a more introspective melancholy, seamless projections of love, devotion, and heartbreak that also seem to have just barely escaped the inner depth that produced them.

In 1992, Sade returned to the studio after a short break following their tour for Stronger Than Pride. They worked for four months, a shorter and less dislocated session than the ones that generated some of their previous recordings, and the album they made, Love Deluxe, is their most monolithic in sound. It is made of inhales. The album title comes from Adu’s concept of love: “The idea is that it’s one of the few luxury things that you can’t buy,” she said in an interview at the time. “You can buy any kind of love but you can’t get love deluxe.”

It’s this sense of blissful abstraction in which the album swims, a total slipstream of feeling and experience and longing in which one can lose themselves and their contexts. The band plays with an almost fluid dynamism, audible in the oceanic churn of Matthewman’s guitar on “No Ordinary Love,” or in the way Hale’s synth work tends to add long, drowsy auras to his piano chords. Matthewman is, in interviews, often quick to diminish the actual abilities of the band, and suggests they are guided less by supreme talent than by interplay. “I think one of the reasons we’ve been successful at what we do is that we’re all decent musicians, but we’re not great musicians,” he said. “I think we all play really well together.”

Sade had played against drum machines before, but Love Deluxe was the first time they recorded an album almost entirely without a live drummer, and the particular yawn and lurch of the programmed beats on Love Deluxe somewhat align it with the parallel development of trip-hop. Massive Attack’s Blue Lines had come out just a year earlier, and the distance between snare hits on songs like “No Ordinary Love” and “Cherish the Day” seems to open a space in which lushness and dread merge. (Trip-hop feels like a spiritual continuation of jazz-pop, but with the dub element having swallowed and warped everything else beyond recognition; it produced its jazziness less through polished holistic productions than through the harsh collision of samples.)

There’s also crispness, a vacuum-sealed quality to the percussion that links it to the Dallas Austin-produced R&B of the mid-’90s, e.g. Madonna’s “Secret.” The drums act as a skeleton around which the rest of the notes pulse, drift, and fuse into an immaculate surface, all of which feel like sensitive responses to the lunar gravity exerted by the band’s eponymous singer. The arrangements bend around Adu’s voice, its narcotic pull, the way that its range sounds finely sifted out of other potential vocal material, perfectly decanted.

By 1992, Adu had arrived at a particular economy in her expressions of desire and heartache; “No Ordinary Love” is a song about a relentless, almost sacrificial devotion, which seems to consume and replace the person giving it. “I gave you all that I had inside and you took my love/You took my love,” she sings as the band designs a kind of pulsing, amniotic fog around her vocal. In the music video, Adu plays a character that resembles the Little Mermaid; she sits on the ocean floor, reading a wedding magazine among great muscles of coral and fluttering plantlife. Lured by a sailor to the surface, she evolves legs and a wedding dress, and walks down a dock while throwing handfuls of rice over herself. She enters a dive bar, orders a glass of water, and pours salt into it, a visible gesture of survival which disconnects her from the people around her. She never encounters the sailor above water. It’s a perfect visual embodiment of a Sade song, in that it conveys the total isolation of desire, Adu’s mermaid caught not exactly in love, but in the continuum of fantasy and abstraction. In the end, she sits by the dock, consuming water from a bottle.

On Love Deluxe, Adu also writes her own character studies, though distinct from her earlier attempts in “Smooth Operator” and “Jezebel”; here she’s so thoroughly embedded in the perspectives that it becomes hard to distinguish her, or even them, from the feelings conveyed. “I collect ideas in my head all the time,” Adu said in an interview at the time. “The things that most depress you are often the things that you write about.” In “Feel No Pain,” she describes the suffocation and paralysis of unemployment; “Pearls” focuses on the trials of a woman in Somalia and the dignity of survival; “Like a Tattoo” forms itself out of the perspective of a war veteran Adu met in a Manhattan bar. “I remembered his hands,” she sings, “And the way the mountains looked/The light shot diamonds from his eyes.” It’s hard to tell whether Adu is remembering the soldier, or if she’s the soldier remembering someone he killed, or if the perspective has totally collapsed and is flowing back and forth unconsciously, less a documentary of something that happened than a kinetic sculpture of it, depicting an emotional vastness that floats somewhere beyond experience.

“Like a Tattoo” and “Pearls” are the most amorphous compositions on Love Deluxe; given their spartan instrumentation—one drumless, the other buoyed by strings—they feel as if they’ve been severed from their greater contexts and are floating in their own darknesses. But this darkness swells throughout the record, and marbles even the luminous compositions with shadow; it flows into Matthewman’s saxophone, which fills the margins of “Bullet Proof Soul” with smoke; it causes me to be unable to tell whether the guitar in “Cherish the Day” is spilling honeyed light into the song or is instead weeping.

Of course, this darkness could be native to the grammar Adu revisits most: love. This is a love with its genome completely unfolded, so that even when she sings of incandescent romantic delight, as on “Kiss of Life,” one is able to catch a glimpse of its origin, whether in loneliness, desire, or obsession. Conversely, in songs like “Cherish the Day” and “Bullet Proof Soul,” one is able to apprehend love’s expiration point, what it inevitably shores up against: its death. “It’s not hard to find love, it is to keep it,” Adu once said. “It’s something which is like [one of] the more mysterious things in life. It’s like death and it’s like birth, and it can’t really be completely explained.”

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