August 25

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Free download of new album, “Music Chamber”

Posted by on 2013/08/25 in Music, Musings

Cover 2

I’ve released the “Angels” pieces as an album called, “Music Chamber.”  These are the high quality masters of the tracks, which I highly recommend listening to.  Because of the nature of the music, a lot of the overtones and “phantom” voices are lost with the compressed streaming versions.

I’ve put these up on the “name your price,” site, Bandcamp, where you can download them in a variety formats.  I recommended you choose FLAC, which is a “lossless” format that will give you the same quality as CD.  If you act fast, the first 200 people to download the tracks will get them for free.

Download the tracks at: http://cinemavolta.bandcamp.com/album/music-chamber 

The liner notes:

Music Chamber is a collection of ambient solo guitar pieces, each with the title, “And Flights of Angels Sing Thee To Thy Rest.”

They are very simple pieces, each in an open tuning, and all of them played into a huge reverb. The combination of the overtones created by the open, ringing strings and the dense acoustics of the massive chamber creates surprising spectral effects – the sounds of distant voices, flutes, and other instruments seem to materialise like a hallucination or something half-remembered from a dream.

The last of the three pieces was the first written, and was responsible for the title of all three. I was asked to perform in a memorial concert for my old friend, the musician David Gamper, at Roulette in NYC in 2012. It took me a long time to write the piece – it was important for me to create something that expressed both my sadness at his passing and what an incredible influence he had been on me, both musically and personally.

There are a range of other influences that come into play in these tracks as well. The tunings are pretty much standard blues open tunings and the fact that there are no chord changes comes directly from musicians like John Lee Hooker and James Brown.

Other influences on the piece were the works of Charlemagne Palestine, Rhys Chatham, Alvin Lucier, Robert Fripp, Brian Eno, Glen Branca, and many others.

And for the guitarists:

Part 1 is in open D on my Stratocaster, using two Spider capos.

Part 2 is in open E on my Yamaha acoustic, also using the Spider capos.

Part 3 is tuned directly to open A on my Les Paul.