LOVE ALL DAY

The third installment of Secular Music Group’s trilogy for Love All Day finds the group operating as a five-person ensemble for the first time. This latest release has the group following the exact same methodology as Volumes One and Two: no rehearsals, three days in the studio, and entirely recorded on a 1973 Teac 4-track ¼” tape deck. They’ve never been more fully realized in their intentions and compositions, and the clarity of the recording and innovative use of the studio makes it almost a sixth member. With five sets of hands and every member a multi-instrumentalist, the group was able to create fully complete arrangements with no overdubs whatsoever, and you can hear this approach on such tracks as “Fish in the ashes”, “Tzuan” and others. Conversely, on more elaborate tunes such as “Uxe” and “Go See the Place Where We Came From” (both of which originated from group member Yannis Panos) they were able to lay down a full five-man rhythm section in stereo and still have two tracks available for overdubs, turning these tunes into huge 10-part arrangements with just a single 4-track tape recorder. “Uxe”, which opens the album, illustrates this beautifully by beginning with a lilting, minimal, McCoy Tyner-esque piano vamp before gracefully expanding in sound, scope, and uplift. Utilizing drums, marimbas, synths, pianos, tenor, alto, and soprano saxophone, flugelhorn, tape loops electric piano and more, they’re still exploring the intersection of vintage soundtracks, modal jazz, and 1970s Italian library music, while also further heavily leaning into classical music this go round, whether on “Mother-Father”, whose pulsing maracas and ostinato rhythmic and melodic figures harken back to Steve Reich, or “He Was Asked to Name Everything”, which was informed by ancient Gregorian Chant tones, the “primitive tech” of early Stockhausen, and Arvo Pärt’s “holy minimalism”. One of the remarkable things about this group is how they make all these disparate parts and influences sound so cohesive. The music flows seamlessly, with every harmonically simple (yet timbrally complex) drone, dense chord, or jazz-influenced progression inhabiting some kind of liminal space that transcends genre.

The third installment of Secular Music Group’s trilogy for Love All Day finds the group operating as a five-person ensemble for the first time. This latest release has the group following the exact same methodology as Volumes One and Two: no rehearsals, three days in the studio, and entirely recorded on a 1973 Teac 4-track ¼” tape deck. They’ve never been more fully realized in their intentions and compositions, and the clarity of the recording and innovative use of the studio makes it almost a sixth member. With five sets of hands and every member a multi-instrumentalist, the group was able to create fully complete arrangements with no overdubs whatsoever, and you can hear this approach on such tracks as “Fish in the ashes”, “Tzuan” and others. Conversely, on more elaborate tunes such as “Uxe” and “Go See the Place Where We Came From” (both of which originated from group member Yannis Panos) they were able to lay down a full five-man rhythm section in stereo and still have two tracks available for overdubs, turning these tunes into huge 10-part arrangements with just a single 4-track tape recorder. “Uxe”, which opens the album, illustrates this beautifully by beginning with a lilting, minimal, McCoy Tyner-esque piano vamp before gracefully expanding in sound, scope, and uplift. Utilizing drums, marimbas, synths, pianos, tenor, alto, and soprano saxophone, flugelhorn, tape loops electric piano and more, they’re still exploring the intersection of vintage soundtracks, modal jazz, and 1970s Italian library music, while also further heavily leaning into classical music this go round, whether on “Mother-Father”, whose pulsing maracas and ostinato rhythmic and melodic figures harken back to Steve Reich, or “He Was Asked to Name Everything”, which was informed by ancient Gregorian Chant tones, the “primitive tech” of early Stockhausen, and Arvo Pärt’s “holy minimalism”. One of the remarkable things about this group is how they make all these disparate parts and influences sound so cohesive. The music flows seamlessly, with every harmonically simple (yet timbrally complex) drone, dense chord, or jazz-influenced progression inhabiting some kind of liminal space that transcends genre.

seven-f by LOVE ALL DAY

eight-b by LOVE ALL DAY

'no one notices the fly' is the latest release from Chicago based multi-disciplinary artist, Zander Raymond. Raymond, who has authored or appeared on around a dozen albums (give or take a couple) in the last half-decade, here continues to refine his approach to careful and active listening and music making. On this collection he’s occasionally joined by past collaborators and deep listening comrades Lia Kohl and Matt Sage. Opening with “just keep going”, a brief recording of a reaching and plaintive, out-of-tune violin whose amateurish playing nevertheless delivers a certain depth of feeling. It also possibly acts as a bit of a mission statement; that here we will be shown that we can find meaning from the barest of means. Every song on this record is slightly cracked and seemingly concerned with detritus, each piece a careful and layered accumulation of what in other hands might be solely considered cast-off sounds. The songs could almost be the aural equivalent of the Japanese sculptor Yuji Agematsu’s daily collection of “desirable street debris”, which he constructs in exquisite, miniature arrangements inside the empty cellophane sleeves of old cigarette packages; each piece a new and unique, dazzling landscape, a whole world unto itself. Through Raymond’s improvisational approach, which employs live sampling and imaginative filtering, the most mundane sounds are refracted into a new, if fleeting, reality. The micro becomes macro, the quotidian rendered into the sublime. In these songs we might find certain doors opening, wind breezing through, steam rising, or restless feet becoming grounded. A piece will sound stable, until it’s not. Patterns are set until small insertions and intrusions interrupt, and maybe a new pattern will form. Or maybe not. One of the minor miracles of this album is that it appears, via sound, to render entropy in action. Across its fourteen tracks, we find a thoughtful, modest reminder to take notice of the aleatory nature of our lives, to maybe even “notice the fly”, as it were.

SMG - Bearer, Begetter by LOVE ALL DAY

SMG - Auilix's Place by LOVE ALL DAY

SMG - Seven Cane by LOVE ALL DAY

Two-C-b-102522 - d. stine & Doug Fogelson by LOVE ALL DAY

Two-B-a-102522 - d. stine & Doug Fogelson by LOVE ALL DAY

Six-A-021523 - d. stine & Doug Fogelson by LOVE ALL DAY

Sabbatical - Live Feb 2016 by LOVE ALL DAY

Recorded over a six year period, Sabbatical’s Sundown germinated in the cracks that separate the disparate moments of a life, and found its rhythms nursed in the openings that emerged between other projects. In those spaces – periods of exception from the flow, journeys, downtime, lacunae – Sundown waited for its creator, gathering energy, until it grew to become the centre point around which Sabbatical’s other activities would begin to orbit. A sabbatical is itself a lacuna. It is the time that is set aside. And our sabbaticals, our downtimes, long or short, are both temporal and spatial – they are often characterised by journeys, or the lack of them. We take breaks and make moves, or we stay put and cease constant movement: sacred time always demands sacred spaces, spaces within which normal rules are temporarily repealed, reversed, or augmented. Music is the magic prism that fixes such fragments of time in suspension and holds them, crystalline, up to the light so that they can be felt and understood again. And its focus can be precise: within the mirrored interior of a song, music can preserve also the locations through which time passes, or which might themselves be said to have passed through the slivers of time that music holds. And so Sundown recalls not only traces of the time in which it developed, but also the places through which this time was poured. Sabbatical’s palette seeks not to evoke but to recover and hold the glittering light on journeys to ice-fringed points north, to arrest in analogue the frequencies of evening light, to capture as reverie the marchlands where time is spent in space in such a way that their interrelationship becomes blurred (for is not a journey’s length typically measured in time and distance at once?). The earth moves around the sun – by this spatial relation we find a temporal measure – but we apprehend it perceptually as the movement of the sun around the earth, and the effort of adjusting what we perceive to what we know is similar in kind to recognising that what we had felt peripheral has secretly become the centre of our efforts. As flowers turn their faces toward the sun, so we turn toward the work that draws us, and at sundown we close our books and take our daily sabbatical of sleep.

Recorded over a six year period, Sabbatical’s Sundown germinated in the cracks that separate the disparate moments of a life, and found its rhythms nursed in the openings that emerged between other projects. In those spaces – periods of exception from the flow, journeys, downtime, lacunae – Sundown waited for its creator, gathering energy, until it grew to become the centre point around which Sabbatical’s other activities would begin to orbit. A sabbatical is itself a lacuna. It is the time that is set aside. And our sabbaticals, our downtimes, long or short, are both temporal and spatial – they are often characterised by journeys, or the lack of them. We take breaks and make moves, or we stay put and cease constant movement: sacred time always demands sacred spaces, spaces within which normal rules are temporarily repealed, reversed, or augmented. Music is the magic prism that fixes such fragments of time in suspension and holds them, crystalline, up to the light so that they can be felt and understood again. And its focus can be precise: within the mirrored interior of a song, music can preserve also the locations through which time passes, or which might themselves be said to have passed through the slivers of time that music holds. And so Sundown recalls not only traces of the time in which it developed, but also the places through which this time was poured. Sabbatical’s palette seeks not to evoke but to recover and hold the glittering light on journeys to ice-fringed points north, to arrest in analogue the frequencies of evening light, to capture as reverie the marchlands where time is spent in space in such a way that their interrelationship becomes blurred (for is not a journey’s length typically measured in time and distance at once?). The earth moves around the sun – by this spatial relation we find a temporal measure – but we apprehend it perceptually as the movement of the sun around the earth, and the effort of adjusting what we perceive to what we know is similar in kind to recognising that what we had felt peripheral has secretly become the centre of our efforts. As flowers turn their faces toward the sun, so we turn toward the work that draws us, and at sundown we close our books and take our daily sabbatical of sleep.

Recorded in 2012, Secret Courts documents the latest phase of the ongoing collaboration between Celestino and Jams P Valentine, a partnership that also yielded 2009’s Sky Burials (SB001). The compositions on Secret Courts were created through a staggered, elastic process, with Celestino weaving sonic backcloths on which Valentine could embroider a response. The production is conversational and complementary, but yields a panoramically conceived sound world – the initial absorption in fine texture navigates the sound toward wider vistas, and tracks that emerge in near ascetic austerity are gradually suffused by a tonal warmth that allows softly rhythmic forms to raise themselves. A deeply integrated matrix of live instrumentation, samples and field recordings gift the music buoyancy and warmth, while the shimmering sonic fabric that rides beneath the surface stretches itself into new forms. These forms in turn open new and unfamiliar time-spaces in the music, channels in which feeling and thought can gather and flow forth in gentle catharsis. Who can know what judgements are made in the secret court of the heart? Friendship and collaboration are processes which force the shabby locks of the self, dispelling the illusion of the discrete individual, requiring it to open itself to other souls, other thoughts and feelings. Communication, musical or otherwise, is less an interface between separated beings, more the generation of an emergent, agile intelligence that exists in the interstices: between minds, not within them. Secret Courts is a transmission on this wavelength – a message from the place where friendship and enmity vibrate in tune, their music suspended in the spaces where opposites dissolve and differences can signal only that they have been overcome. Such spaces have no coordinates, but sound is the truest guide to them, for the experiential drop- outs that music wrests from time reveal their surest point of entry. And where the silent pulses that flow within studio hardware can be harnessed, visitors can be conducted along wire-blind trails toward the sacred precincts where sound travels with spirit and washes the soul. It is by these paths and in these spaces that Celestino and Valentine hope to arrive with us at the secret courts.