 Each release is a one-time vinyl pressing and will be housed in a letterpress band (designed by Bryan Christopher Baker) that will vary with each installment (each will also be available in the vastly inferior digital format). These LPs will also include artwork and assorted ephemera that invoke our deepest respect for the medium and the hand-crafted (and assembled) components we regret have disappeared with the rise of digital media. R/W terminates after ten installments.
AMI 032 R/W ENSEMBLE ECONOMIQUE Standing Still, Facing Forward LP AMI 033 R/W BEN VIDA / KEITH FULLERTON WHITMAN AGGREGATEPULSERIPPER (DAMAGED IIII) / 080114
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AMI 031 R/W
SON OF EARTH
Improvements LP
Side A
Side B
While still being filled with the unease and tension that is their hallmark, Improvements is the first record that also allows the humor and camaraderie between the members of Son of Earth to come to the fore. Most of their previous releases have been culled from live recordings, and the group has always thrived on the tension of live performance. Earlier studio efforts, such as the acclaimed Pet LP, though recorded at home, were composed in an everyone-has-to-be-serious approximation of the live performance experience. This time, possibly for the first time, in a sweaty little room, and in a stairwell, and in a back yard tossing horseshoes in Holyoke, Massachusetts, the group finally dropped all pretense - not of seriousness, but of obligation to some unseen spectator. On Improvements, you can really hear John Shaw, Matt Krefting, and Aaron Rosenblum being themselves, and being Son of Earth and it's weird. Manchester-bred, Rick Myers, who has worked with John Cale, Andy Votel, Dinosaur Jr. and Badly Drawn Boy and has created books with Nieves Zurich & Gladtree Press to name a few, provides the beautiful art / design-work for the LP jackets. LP comes wrapped in letter-pressed band and contains a 16-page art book.
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AMI 032 R/W
ENSEMBLE ECONOMIQUE
Standing Still, Facing Forward LP
Side A
Side B
The primary step in understanding Standing Still, Facing Forward is to recognize Ensemble Economique is Brian Pyle. Brian Pyle is Ensemble Economique. This is the first LP release from Ensemble Economique. Digitalis issued the At the Foot of Nameless Roads CD in 2008. Ensemble Economique's fantastic earliest recording, entitled No GPS, was bundled as a CDr with a limited initial pressing of At the Foot, but has yet to be properly issued. Both recordings are important primers to Pyle's nascent invocations of Holger Czukay's Cannaxis (on No GPS) and Karlheinz Stockhausen's Kontake (on At the Foot). With Standing Still, Facing Forward Ensemble Economique provides the most mature realization of Pyle's compositional process, which utilizes found sounds, field recordings, and musical performance that he later meticulously edits, layers, and loops in the studio. The effects of these processes are dramatic, cinematic and conceptually rigorous and this recording evidences Pyle as an important new composer emerging out of the long and storied tradition of West Coast experimentalism. Utilizing a delicate combination of the homespun improvisation of his other project, Starving Weirdos (whose work sounds like an American echo of AMM) with his own unique variation on the European avant-garde in Ensemble Economique, Pyle's practice involves a dense approach to composition akin to assemblage. But unlike electronic and laptop composition, Pyle's studio work aims to re-establish an organicism associated with live (or, in the case of the field recordings, lived) performance that pushes the studio out into nature and nature into the studio. In short, the Northern Californian landscape plays an integral part in Ensemble Economique's soundscapes, and this record captures much of the atmosphere of Pyle's home terrain.
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AMI 033 R/W
BEN VIDA / KEITH FULLERTON WHITMAN
AGGREGATEPULSERIPPER (DAMAGED IIII) / 080114
Side A
Side B
The third iteration in the Required Wreckers Series, a split LP featuring new and exclusive work from Ben Vida and Keith Fullerton Whitman (AMI-033 R/W). Having collaborated over the last decade as a trio with Greg Davis, this release features new solo-work by two of America's most important emerging sound artists. The first side of this release debuts a new composition from Ben Vida. In keeping with his recent patchwork-based compositions, AGGREGATEPULSERIPPER (DAMAGED IIII) continues to explore Vida's interest in both digital and analog control sources, a compositional process that refuses to fetishize one technology over another and, more interestingly, appears (though, of course, these appearances are deceptive) to displace the musician's hand from the compositional process. In light of Vida's early work with the acoustic ensemble, Town and Country, and the world music and concrete studies of his solo project, Bird Show, this new compositional method should not be overemphasized. For this piece, Vida creates a complex web of patches that change and morph in what he has contextualized as a series of shifting generative patterns. The subtitle of his piece references how these patterns coalesce in aggressive, almost hardcore, clusters of sound that refuse to slip into contemplative or mystical arenas that so many in today's electronic music reference in relation to their work. Vida's composition opts instead to remain engaged in the phenomenal and spatial forces that shape our perception of sound. The flipside of this LP features Keith Fullerton Whitman's third in a series of splits (previous releases have included No Fun Production's b/w Carlos Giffoni and Amethyst Sunset's b/w with Mike Shiflet) documenting a particularly productive period in his creative output - a series of "synth concerts" from 2007 and 2008. Recorded on January 14, 2008 at PA's Lounge in Somerville, MA, this piece documents the fourth in Whitman's solo synthesizer sets. His technical set-up is based around a theme (and circuitry) of economy, in which the artist makes use of each CV-source in a variety of fashions. Throughout the recording one can discern talking from the audience and ambient room-tone noise, as well as sound coming from different sources spread throughout the room - a small battery powered speaker on stage right, a giant Barbetta on stage left. Each speaker was fed into a different patch irrespective of its frequency response. Whitman uses a hybrid system of digital and analog sound sources that, with the exception of a single 4096 bd delay, is presented here without treatment, overdub, or sequencing of any sort. New York-based artist Meredyth Spark provides the cover art and sixteen-page booklet for this release. Sparks has been assisting Amish for the last few years with design and layout. This is the first release to exclusively feature her work. The images and design elements for the cover art come from her Extraction series (in truth, the front and back covers are extractions of her extractions), paintings and collages that draw heavily from the aleatory methods and analog/digital processes that both Vida and Whitman utilize in their recordings.
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