https://american-dreams.zone American Dreams Records Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:12:12 +0000 https://american-dreams.zone en https://american-dreams.zone/Artists-1 Sat, 14 Aug 2021 10:51:30 +0000 American Dreams Records https://american-dreams.zone/Artists-1 12 Rods9T AntiopeAaron Turner &amp; Jon MuellerAlex Zhang HungtaiAndrée BurelliAnti-God HandThe Ark of TeethBaldi/Gerycz DuoBlue LickBrett NauckeCameron KnowlerCameron Knowler &amp; Eli WinterCivic CenterClaire RousayDaniel WycheDevin ShafferDorothy CarlosEli Winterevicshen Forest ManagementGerycz/Powers/RolinIbisesJon MuellerJordan ReyesKyle KiddLea Bertucci &amp; Lawrence EnglishLawrence English &amp; Stephen VitielloLesley MokLia KohlLucy LiyouMarvin Tate’s D-SettlementMatthew J. RolinMute DuoNatalie Rose LeBrechtNick ZancaONOOssemaanPale SpringPatrick ShiroishiragenapRESShovel Dance CollectiveSiavash AminiSunk HeaventravisTomuWalt McClementsWendy EisenbergZohraZRL https://american-dreams.zone/Siavash-Amini-Eugene-Thacker-artist-page Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:12:12 +0000 American Dreams Records https://american-dreams.zone/Siavash-Amini-Eugene-Thacker-artist-page <img width="2000" height="1200" width_o="2000" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bec258e03fa15cdcdc6f3932b84b537b9d48cad2ccd9344f6b24d02d6715550b/sa-et2.png" data-mid="250409731" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/bec258e03fa15cdcdc6f3932b84b537b9d48cad2ccd9344f6b24d02d6715550b/sa-et2.png" /> Siavash Amini &amp; Eugene Thacker American Dreams Releases: Songs for Sad Poets, Vol. III Siavash Amini is a composer from Tehran, Iran.&nbsp; He has worked with the labels Room40, Hallow Ground, American Dreams Records, Opal Tapes, and Umor Rex for more than a decade. He also has collaborated with a wide range of international artists, including Rafael Anton Irisarri, 9T Antiope, Heinali and Zenjungle as well as the poet and scholar Eugene Thacker. He has remixed tracks for Carl Craig, Bernard Szajner, LTO, worriedaboutsatan and the duo Arigto among many others. He has performed at CTM festival, MUTEKes, Silent Night Prague and many other well-known international venues and events. He is a co-founder of “SET experimental art events” and “SETfest” in Tehran, Iran.Eugene Thacker is the author of several books, including In The Dust Of This Planet and Infinite Resignation. He teaches at Parsons School of Design in New York City. Born and raised in the Seattle area, he currently lives in Brooklyn. siavashamini.bandcamp.com eugenethacker.com On Songs for Sad Poets Vol. III, Tehran composer Siavash Amini and Brooklyn author Eugene Thacker present lyrics sung by voices, but which are unrecognizable as words – and unintelligible even as voices. The album is an ongoing collaboration inspired by the tradition of “cursed poets” (poètes maudits), following Amini and Thacker’s 2022 double album for Hallow Ground, Songs for Sad Poets Vol. I. Vol. III pays tribute to Hàn Mặc Tử, who founded Vietnam’s “Chaos” (Loạn) school of poetry; João da Cruz e Sousa, the leading figure of Brazilian Symbolist poetry in the late 1800s; and Austrian poet Nikolaus Lenau, an influential figure in the literary tradition of “worldweariness” (Weltschmerz). Writing for chorus, Thacker’s compressed poetry allows words to undergo sonic transformations. Amini transforms Thacker’s minimalist poetry into spectral and haunting soundscapes. After programming voice synthesis software to perform Thacker’s poems, Amini layered up to forty voices at a time, processing them until their vocal signposts diffuse and dissolve. Song and sound implode and become indistinguishable from each other, at once lyrical and abstract. https://american-dreams.zone/Alex-Zhang-Hungtai-artist-page Wed, 22 Apr 2026 15:09:32 +0000 American Dreams Records https://american-dreams.zone/Alex-Zhang-Hungtai-artist-page <img width="2141" height="2449" width_o="2141" height_o="2449" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/35840e191506d49df7c954ae87b4ef74dcaf57d72d4610efd7df8dbeda9481cb/IMG_5960.jpeg" data-mid="247513517" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/35840e191506d49df7c954ae87b4ef74dcaf57d72d4610efd7df8dbeda9481cb/IMG_5960.jpeg" /> Alex Zhang Hungtai American Dreams Releases: Orion / Mother Alex Zhang Hungtai's new double album Orion/Mother, a brave, gigantic burst of life, creativity, and abstract balladry, alchemizes the past and the present, sampling home recordings he made with some of New York’s finest improvisers while spontaneously composing on top of them with trumpet and other instruments. It’s the sound of an artist addressing unresolved fragments from his past, integrating them into the present, and building a new path.“The major contributor to the completion of this double album,” Zhang says, “is the removal of doubt.” For two weeks, during a period of intense personal transition, Zhang wrote and recorded at a rehearsal space, working regimented, full days in the dead of a long brutal New York winter. Inspired by Butch Morris’ method of directing improvisation called conduction, Zhang revisited rehearsal recordings he’d made years before with various New York improvising musicians. He created an ad-hoc group - including percussionist Che Chen, Korean Gong resonator experimentalist Leo Chang, clarinetist Madison Greenstone, flautist Laura Cox, cellist Lester St. Louis, noise artist Kwami Winfield, and tap dancer Melissa Almaguer - using Ableton to cut and match all the different sessions together. Zhang improvised with trumpet over live samples of the chopped sessions, bringing these past recordings to the present moment. You can hear overlapping snippets of his saxophone, drums and voice experimentations from the rehearsal recordings via sampling, whilst the trumpet had then become the “grounding force” and conceptual narrator of Orion/Mother, allowing Zhang to decontextualize, process, and reconcile with the past through abstract lyricism in the present.As Orion/Mother unfolds, Zhang’s trumpet flies above thrumming electronics (“Earth Orbit”), navigates percussion strikes (“Mother”), communes with explosive sounds (“Sidewinder”), or melts into silence (“Tannhäuser Gate”). Just as Zhang uncovered the album’s scope over those two weeks in New York, the album communicates discovery, friendship, community, and attunement. “The music,” he says, “sounds like something that was dormant is starting to awaken.” Here, indeed, is a new being, a new approach to making music, and a new music itself, borne of ingenuity and attention. https://american-dreams.zone/Lawrence-English-Stephen-Vitiello-artist-page Tue, 23 Sep 2025 13:46:47 +0000 American Dreams Records https://american-dreams.zone/Lawrence-English-Stephen-Vitiello-artist-page <img width="1100" height="825" width_o="1100" height_o="825" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b28fe223ed5b2c17c04791ae42dcae79e6ebcabaaab69002ebacb209100d9052/JPEG-image.jpeg" data-mid="238560313" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b28fe223ed5b2c17c04791ae42dcae79e6ebcabaaab69002ebacb209100d9052/JPEG-image.jpeg" /> Lawrence English &amp; Stephen Vitiello American Dreams Releases: Trinity Trinity, the third collaborative album between Lawrence English and Stephen Vitiello, continues the pair’s patient, pliable musical explorations while marrying them with a unique collaborator—one per track—to map new territories. Trinity presents five collaborations with acclaimed artists who work at the edges of sound and genre: Chris Abrahams (The Necks), improvising turntablist Marina Rosenfeld, Brendan Canty (Fugazi, The Messthetics), multidisciplinary artist Aki Onda, and the late contemporary artist and lowercase musician Steve Roden. The results deepen the music’s immediacy and directness, while pushing it in directions neither English nor Vitiello could have foreseen.Trinity has a trick up its sleeve, a surprise. In English’s words, “this record’s surprise was the invitation of a third player.” Its opening track, which features Australian iconoclast Chris Abrahams on piano, drops us right in the middle of the action. His piano, Vitiello says, “floats in and above our bed of sounds,” structuring their warp and weft. But as “With Chris" unfurls, Abrahams’ piano takes a darker hue and moves beneath the lead artists’ bed of sounds, which whispers and gnashes, grasping yet withholding. It’s a microcosm for the album, like looking at a Pointillist painting: pellucid as a whole.The flip side of the coin is the album’s second single, “With Brendan,” featuring legendary punk drummer Brendan Canty. Here, we hear English and Vitiello's gifts for treating music as a sculptural material, and drawing chameleonic permutations from their collaborators. Mixed amidst soft layers of drones that hover just above, Canty’s formidable backbeat teeters on the edge, as if, responding to his collaborators, he might disintegrate the beat or pull it out of phase.“With each of our collaborations,” English says, “Stephen and I have tried to unlock something unexpected, and for us at least, new.” As individual artists, English and Vitiello each use sound as an artistic medium, making site-specific installations and multi-channel works. And, working remotely between Australia and America, English and Vitiello have a long history of playful experimentation. On their past albums—2011’s Acute Inbetweens and 2014’s Fable—English and Vitiello have reveled in modular synthesis, field recordings, and the porous boundaries between a given sound and its distance from the source. Across Trinity’s five pieces, the pair and their collaborators plunge the listener into dynamic, floral worlds that are warm, enigmatic and spacious.Steve Roden, credited on Trinity's final track as playing electronics and “mystery sounds,” died of early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2023. His contributions are delicate and soft, yet among the album’s most vigorous: we hear guitar harmonics, gentle notes, strokes like a violin bow. It's a fitting coda to an open-minded album, which invites us to lean in close to the mystery and listen for what we might each find. https://american-dreams.zone/Fuubutsushi-artist-page Tue, 06 May 2025 01:07:27 +0000 American Dreams Records https://american-dreams.zone/Fuubutsushi-artist-page <img width="1100" height="825" width_o="1100" height_o="825" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3bcb6b421da97faa1ee4831c5ab84d8afb9d33a820d564da9919e36d3eb859d4/images.disco.jpg" data-mid="232830096" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3bcb6b421da97faa1ee4831c5ab84d8afb9d33a820d564da9919e36d3eb859d4/images.disco.jpg" /> Fuubutsushi American Dreams Releases: Columbia Deluxe Columbia Deluxe imbues Fuubutsushi’s music with the electricity of playing for a crowd. Borne of the lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic, the group prepared countless releases remotely from around the country. Columbia Deluxe expands compositions collected from across the band’s body of work, from their earliest releases to their 2024 LP Meridians, translating their careful arrangements into live performance. All four time zones of the continental US are represented in the group's membership: Patrick Shiroishi (Los Angeles), Chris Jusell (Raleigh), Matthew Sage (Colorado Front Range), and Chaz Prymek (Salt Lake City). It’s fitting given the musical landscapes that it surveys, which are dynamic, warm, and both energetic and rewarding of patience. The band has heightened these qualities on Columbia Deluxe.“The music of Fuubutsushi,” Prymek says, “started as a recording project that turned into deep friendships.” After composing music remotely for their acclaimed cycle of four albums for each of the four seasons, the quartet transformed the music in concert at the Columbia Experimental Music Festival (to this day Fuubutsushi’s only live appearance): Shiroishi on saxophones and field recordings, Jusell on violin, Sage on piano and synthesizer, and Prymek on guitar and bass, sharing bells, voice and electronics as a group. “I think we were all pretty nervous about it,” says Shiroishi, “but the audience was with us the entire time and really gave us an incredible amount of energy.” “Part of the thrill,” says Sage, “was that we knew the songs separately, kind of on our own terms. And how it felt to finally turn this music, which we made in such a physically isolated way, to finally come into being in person, for a really receptive audience in a really beautiful room.”There’s a punk ethos at the music’s heart that refracts the group’s stylistic diversity. Jusell has a foundation in classical music, chamber music and pop. As a solo artist and member of The Armed, Shiroishi is rooted in jazz, heavy music, and the places where they intersect. Prymek’s chordal fingerstyle guitar vocabulary, and Sage’s openness to experimentation in music and intermedia art, ground the compositions while giving them room for the band to lift off. As Prymek says, “we’re influenced by everything, but especially by each other.”“Now,” says Prymek, “what you hear out of us is that energy spilling back into our music.” It flows seamlessly from one song to the next, giving the band room to range while maintaining structure. “Bolted Orange” runs just over three minutes on the band’s self-titled debut album: here the band expands it to ten, blossoming, like the first half of the album, around Prymek’s winding, circular guitar lines. Guitar introduces that song and “Shepherd’s Stroll,” followed by declarative piano from Sage. Saxophone and violin either outline the chordal instruments’ color or push them in new directions. In keeping with past releases, the band incorporates field recordings of Japanese Americans talking about their experience in American internment camps during WWII into the music, inviting listeners to confront the past, present and future.Columbia Deluxe is intimate on the surface, and shot through with the thrill of creative risk-taking. Midway through “Shepherd’s Stroll,” with no warning, after developing the composition with dusky, spacious fingerstyle guitar, Prymek moves to bass guitar, pulling out a lumberjack riff. In response, Jusell’s violin soars, repeating a striking, elliptical double-stopped melody. The music swells even more with Shiroishi’s saxophone, as if time-traveling from Western soundtracks to impressions of French court music to—on “Mistral”—gospel time-stretched and zoomed-in. Sage oscillates the song between gigantic chords and rubato arpeggios, during which the song’s structure threatens to give way. Through barely perceptible differences in pitch and tonality, Shiroishi and Jusell keep it together by controlling the chaos.The energy Prymek describes is nearly palpable here, and the music transformed: a “pure manifestation” (Jusell) of unfolding “joy, stumbles, getting up and pushing forward together” (Shiroishi). As Prymek says, “we are making something forever blooming anew,” and it continues to bloom. https://american-dreams.zone/The-Ark-of-Teeth-artist-page Tue, 01 Oct 2024 01:25:49 +0000 American Dreams Records https://american-dreams.zone/The-Ark-of-Teeth-artist-page <img width="3584" height="2240" width_o="3584" height_o="2240" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9ae051e3254e3afe79e914e23716df8f5f230258ce65ebeab69aa016023d83a9/unnamed.png" data-mid="218995488" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9ae051e3254e3afe79e914e23716df8f5f230258ce65ebeab69aa016023d83a9/unnamed.png" /> The Ark of Teeth American Dreams Releases: Untitled Two thousand five hundred people watched Mary the Elephant die on September 16, 1916. Four days prior she killed her inexperienced handler Red Eldridge, one day after being hired on. Upon the handler’s death, onlookers began chanting “Let’s kill it,” prompting locals to fire rounds upon the animal with little effect. Unwilling to call it quits, the circus transported her to the Clinchfield Railroad Yard where she was hanged by the neck with an industrial derrick – except the chain broke, and Mary broke her hips as she crashed to the Earth. Then they did it again and the chain didn’t break. A veterinarian examining her corpse found an infected tooth precisely where Eldridge prodded her with a hook before she attacked him. What happened to the children watching? Did the execution become a lighthouse in internal cartography – cruelty gone luminescent, drifting fog-like, settling on any and all uncovered locales?I’ve been trying to forget the word “cruel” since I learned it, and I’m fucking failing.I’m missing a word from everyone else’s dictionary, and this would all make sense if I had it. Did you know that the most recent common ancestor between human beings and octopi was 750 million years ago? It was a primitive flatworm. The way that cephalopod intelligence developed is entirely independent from that of primates, and there must have been some misunderstanding – clearly they put an octopus brain into my human flesh-casing. Maybe that’s why I always bump into things, why in my mind’s eye my shoulders run an inch-and-a-half narrower, why I feel this tug seaward each time I turn South.I love to sing. I think I made experimental music because I wanted an exoskeleton. The experiment was how many shields could I use to hide myself because singing – I mean really singing – is scary. I’m not happy with carapace-wearing songs.I made this album with some of my best friends at La Frette Studios outside Paris. Nick, Lucy, Brad, Ambre, travis, Patrick, Anthony, and Sammy helped me give myself permission to make what I really love, what I’ve always wanted to make – songs. I owe them so much.And like that – with a bit of love – the nautilus began to emerge from its shell. https://american-dreams.zone/Shovel-Dance-Collective-artist-page Mon, 05 Aug 2024 22:35:36 +0000 American Dreams Records https://american-dreams.zone/Shovel-Dance-Collective-artist-page <img width="1200" height="1200" width_o="1200" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/da3aa68c13cb22c3195a687e1afcdb0be6c70308a73f6dace9f5307bde664dcc/0036721105_10.jpg" data-mid="215898716" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/da3aa68c13cb22c3195a687e1afcdb0be6c70308a73f6dace9f5307bde664dcc/0036721105_10.jpg" /> The Shovel Dance American Dreams Releases: The Shovel Dance The Shovel Dance, the second LP from London's nine-piece folk group Shovel Dance Collective, is their most powerful release to date, bringing studio fidelity and trickery to the rich arrangements and soaring vocals of their concerts. While their work has always had an inventive bent, The Shovel Dance unifies the band’s experimentation with their live immediacy. Indeed, what sets The Shovel Dance apart is the Collective itself. The album revolves around their interplay and close listening, no matter how many members of the band play on a given song or how many instruments feature (there are twenty-five instruments and eight voices). The band are attentive to the English, Irish and Scottish sources they reference, which date back to the 1600s and beyond. At the same time, they give their arrangements an experimental edge—as close to Scott Walker or Swans as Shirley Collins or Bert Lloyd—that situates them on the bleeding edge of folk music.“It clicked immediately when we first played together,” the band says. It traces its origins to Daniel S. Evans playing card games and tunes with Alex McKenzie and Joshua Barfoot. “Somehow,” the band says, “we always reached together towards the sublime. This was before there was a folk scene for young weirdos like ourselves.” The group grew naturally into its nine-piece membership—which, in addition to Evans, McKenzie and Barfoot, includes Fidelma Hanrahan, Jacken Elswyth, Oliver Hamilton, Tom Hardwick-Allan, and the group’s lead vocalists, Nick Granata and Mataio Austin Dean. Together, they landed on central ideas to explore as Shovel Dance Collective. Within their aesthetic commitment to acoustic instruments, “we want to play and experiment, layer and move between different spaces in recording, and extend the limits of our instruments to sing and break in new ways,” the group says. “Improvising, textural playing, and moving as one free organic organism are all part of the experiments we try and make in form. It’s all towards this one goal: constructing the Shovel Dance world and saying what we feel needs saying.”These recordings have a confidence honed through the band’s tireless performance schedule across Europe. Take the “Abbots Bromley Horn Dance,” which leads off The Shovel Dance. Traditionally, it’s a celebratory dance for ten people, with ancient reindeer antlers and a hobby horse, and two musicians playing accordion and triangle. The band extends it into a four-part instrumental doom folk proclamation, waxing and waning between birdsong and a quiet minor-key meditation that builds into a lush, roiling crescendo. Then the bottom falls out into silence, and a quiet pipe organ introduces “The Worms Crept Out,” a World War I song about a decomposing body, as Granata sings. This is as much the album’s opening track as a musical mission statement for the band: first, folk music is living, even—or especially—when it’s about death. And interpreting folk music with emotion and present-day musical textures connects the music to its forebears. Nowhere is this more true than on "The Four Loom Weaver." Performed unaccompanied by Austin Dean, the song inhabits the perspective of a weaver who’s lost his job to steam-powered weaving machines, reduced by his poverty to eating nettles. A fellow weaver, afraid to confront their boss, says, “We might have better luck if we’d just hold our tongues.” The speaker responds, “I’ve holden my tongue ’til I near lost my breath, and I feel in my own heart I’ll soon clem [or starve] to death.” As Austin Dean moves between quiet vocal fry and the top of his baritone, he imbues the music with a piercing sense of familiarity connecting the past and the present, transcending space and time. “By having this spatio-temporal sense of folk music,” the group says, “we can reject a linear time, and promote new ways of looking at land and history to highlight the struggle of oppressed peoples everywhere.“Shovel Dance Collective are among several working bands that function as a leaderless collective, but they’re unique for the beauty, force, and political charge of their folk music. “Folk music,” the band says, “places you in a great chain of everyday life, and how it can relate so intimately to political and emotional actions, past and present.” And what's more, “it infers a beautiful collectivity.” The Shovel Dance brings the band’s collectivity to its fullest realization yet. https://american-dreams.zone/Wendy-Eisenberg-artist-page Wed, 17 Jul 2024 03:27:58 +0000 American Dreams Records https://american-dreams.zone/Wendy-Eisenberg-artist-page <img width="1100" height="729" width_o="1100" height_o="729" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/668951080b9893d1aa2f3f627bf026a6cae324ccb00e36d4b80a939652a769b9/images.disco-1.jpg" data-mid="214793127" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/668951080b9893d1aa2f3f627bf026a6cae324ccb00e36d4b80a939652a769b9/images.disco-1.jpg" /> Wendy Eisenberg American Dreams Releases Viewfinder After a life of horrible eyesight, dryness, infections, astigmatism, harsh blurs, migraines, expensive and heavy glasses, discomfort with the ocean, and other seemingly benign minor grievances, I caved and got Lasik in the fall of 2021. Finally able to see the world unmediated, everything about my relationship to tactility, immediacy, and perception changed. I could no longer blame the distance and otherness I feel in this this world on the too-fallible panes of glass or plastic that delivered the visual world closer to me. I had to write myself into clarity about the closeness I now felt to the visual world, how disorienting clarity can be.Writing this song cycle for improvisers was a process of meditation on the concepts of vision, the visible, signs, viewpoints, eyes themselves. Looking. That strange, faintly colonial relationship between seeing something and thinking you understand it, believing that you own it, in a way, because you can see it. I read John Berger and Jacqueline Rose and Jonathan Crary. I remembered that Spinoza was a lens grinder and considered how that informed the incredible vastness of his concept of God. I thought about how Wittgenstein went to the movies almost every day. I learned a wild fact about Bach, which is that he died of complications after being blinded by a botched eye surgery at the hands of a charlatan, the Chevalier John Taylor, who also blinded Handel. The threat of darkness, of blindness, loomed around the possibility of healing; entering the meditative field post-surgery was my relationship to risk. What do we risk for the sake of the improvement of our lives? What do we lose when we can see things clearly? What stays out of frame, and what does it mean to us to finally see it?When you get Lasik, you stay awake, and can see the light move as the surgery is performed. You are minorly drugged and numbed, then subjected to a completely unrepeatable structural film, the transfiguration of your own body part towards optimal functioning. A Biblical act in a bright white room, a faint high voice saying to look in certain directions as the surgery is performed, and a memory of 2001: A Space Odyssey; 15 minutes of the film of your own eyes.This song cycle is a sonic reflection on the aftereffects of this new clarity, but I wanted to give the audience a taste of that sublime visual surprise, so I had the aptly named Richard Lenz, an incredibly gifted artist and photographer, devise visual projections. In his infinite material thoughtfulness, most of the images of his projections are non-representational. They take place within the camera, how the camera looks to and within itself, without a lens but only with light. I remain astonished by his creativity and resourcefulness, the use of cardboard for a lens, the reorientation of the camera from a documenter of things external to itself into a self-reflexive instrument, the use of the viewfinder as the creator of the image, not the searcher for it.The working name for this album was Eye Music, axed both because it suffered from some alternately techy or selfish homophones, and because of the primacy of the viewfinder as the tool of omnidirectional reflection in both Richard’s projections and my own.As composer and lyricist, as artist or lover or friend, nobody, nothing projects truly clearly. Objectivity is a seductive myth, as wiggly as anything else that wants to be seen or understood. Since writing this music, I have begun to comfort myself with the notion that loving something does not require that what is beloved be understood. I would not have reached that notion without following this meditation on sight so deeply that it showed me the beauty of what is impossible to see. https://american-dreams.zone/Nick-Zanca-artist-page Tue, 28 May 2024 20:48:20 +0000 American Dreams Records https://american-dreams.zone/Nick-Zanca-artist-page <img width="1200" height="1200" width_o="1200" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/70dc99619ff895fa72feff3f1d11e92ab3ba97981d6514b5b43cfdb5cc589430/a0416391977_10.jpg" data-mid="211848291" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/70dc99619ff895fa72feff3f1d11e92ab3ba97981d6514b5b43cfdb5cc589430/a0416391977_10.jpg" /> Nick Zanca American Dreams Releases: Hindsight Nick Zanca and I have known each other since we were in our early teens and have always been exactly who we are: high-literary goofballs with very particular, somewhat frantic energies, deep freaks who care about Different Music, laughers mid-cry. In the Great Hall that preserves all “Types of People,” we do not find ourselves easily represented. Our particularities, which are our beauty, have us engage in any close representation of our type with the small, sharp knife of the skeptic. Our particulars, ourselves, desire preservation. We are lucky we found each other.One night recently, Nick was in the cosmic studio of the mind, reviewing the job description for a songwriter/producer. He noticed something new on that docket – right under “professional looker,” there sat a fine-print requirement: night steward of People Hall, preserver and expander of the capacities of all types, emissary and docent of and beyond all those “Types of People.” Those chuckling gods who make some people crazy enough to become both songwriter and producer require us to expose the virtues of other people. We have to make the specificities of our collaborators and our subjects reverberate, as in a cavernous pantheon with light, reflective walls. It was no longer enough to have perfect ears and lots of technical fluency: Nick, it was decreed, needed to set himself within the Hall as subject and background alike.Stewarding People Hall is an archival project. It is concerned with the timing of things. I recorded my contribution to Hindsight with Nick on Long Island, playing my archtop in homage to Derek Bailey’s contributions to the timeless David Sylvian record Blemish, a record Nick showed me, that became an aesthetic lodestar for me. Playing referentially in a way called “non-idiomatically”, for a day-one, while thinking of an older record, the wood-paneled hall of reference sang back to us, which is to say, I felt time. That is the other joint responsibility for songwriter and producer alike. To feel time.Nick tells me that he considers this record as a "producer's songwriter album" in the tradition of Jim O'Rourke, Todd Rundgren, Jon Brion. Hindsight, he said to me, is “something that explores what occurs when turning inward after an extended period of collaboration.” Yes, that is a fantastic alternate or extrapolative definition of that word, but this is not an inward album: it’s an album that calls its listener “my love,” that often beseeches a “we.” It’s an album where the singer sings, “let me be there for you.” The harmony extends a comforting hand, surprising where it grazes. The rhythm shifts, falling asymmetric around the lyrics in a manner recalling Nick’s spiritual forebear, Stephen Sondheim. The orchestration sounds like it is reaching out, too - densely, lightly, Nick’s close friends populate the record, bringing the reality of the past few years of his life into sharp relief. He brings us in, though the specifics of his world could only be his. We see him clearly. It could come from nobody else.Wendy EisenbergApril 2024 https://american-dreams.zone/9T-Antiope-artist-page Tue, 06 Feb 2024 03:57:11 +0000 American Dreams Records https://american-dreams.zone/9T-Antiope-artist-page <img width="1425" height="1115" width_o="1425" height_o="1115" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6fd9fb410e7d05a50e5e5e1d91388fe46db0f2edbec5a486a43ab946ad0395c8/9T_Antiope_BTR35.jpg" data-mid="203955093" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6fd9fb410e7d05a50e5e5e1d91388fe46db0f2edbec5a486a43ab946ad0395c8/9T_Antiope_BTR35.jpg" /> 9T Antiope American Dreams Releases: Horror Vacui Picture this: there's a big house at the end of the street. When you walk past it, you can't tell if it's full or empty. Its two caretakers—who, to add to the uncanniness, wear crimson suits—clean the house, inspect it, and carry out headcounts. Sometimes they only count themselves. Sometimes they count hundreds of people. They don't know why this is the case, why the house has so many rooms and stories: it’s not their job to know. One day, as you walk past, a void enters and the house explodes. What happens to what's inside? What impact does it have on your memory? This is the story of 9T Antiope’s Horror Vacui, a concept album that develops the band’s cinematic work into new reaches, exploring what sounds have been and what they’ll become, and the nature of memory, dementia, and decay.On past albums, Nima Aghiani and Sara Bigdeli Shamloo gave voice to the challenges of their lives as Iranian expatriates, but here they expand the scope of their music, turning the idea of horror vacui on its head. Conceptually, horror vacui hinges on a resistance to letting empty spaces remain empty. Is it part of human nature or nature itself? If, as Aristotle is summarized, “nature abhors a vacuum,” why?9T Antiope drill into the fears of horror vacui while building a dynamic world that seems to exist outside of the bounds of time and place. “For people like us,” the band says, “living in the in-between of two worlds we’ve lived in, the ongoing search for a relation between the world one used to know and the new world—at times, neither the origin nor the destination exist as a whole. New and old sounds, colors, textures and spaces overlap. Then the differences emerge, drag the two spaces apart,” and create thresholds. The title track illustrates these thresholds most prominently with the kh sound in Farsi, where vastly different meanings result from slight changes in pronunciation, language alone struggling to convey its depths. Other songs directly call out the complications of memory (“Let me forget…I no longer want to hear or smell or see”), flashbacks, or the difficulty of dementia and age-related decline.Relying on a sparse palette of octave mandolin, violin, octave violin, synthesizer, and vocals, 9T Antiope has honed their attention to the relationship between sound and language. As the physical details of bodies and experience present themselves as ruptures, the music shows the difficulty of accepting the ruptures and the process that creates them. As Shamloo sings on album opener “Shapeshift”: “No more, no more, no more feelings/No more, no more, no more kneeling/To push through, had to stop dreaming/I shift, I go, I shift.” The song expresses the apprehension of watching one’s own world unfold before their eyes, with “the constant emergence of flashbacks and the ongoing fear of forgetting or being forgotten.” This process becomes palpable on the title track, thanks to the dichotomy between Aghiani’s crunching drone, quivering octave violin, and Shamloo’s vocals—spoken, crooned and snarled.The album walks a line between structure and formlessness, heaviness and softness, contemporary production and deep-rooted Middle Eastern melodies. At bottom, Horror Vacuiuses music and language as tools to confront dualities and acknowledge the space between them. Rather than pretend the fear isn’t there, it says, look, and invites you to look with it. creditsreleased July 12, 2023Music composed and produced by Nima AghianiSongs written and performed by Sara Bigdeli ShamlooViolin, octave Violin and octave mandolin performed by Nima AghianiMixed and mastered by Nima AghianiArtwork by Ashkan NoroozkhaniDesign by Devin Shaffer