The Strindbergs - Purgatorio

available at: The Strindbergs

This project began when Jake Berry sent me a voice track. I built the record, both movements around this voice. Using keyboards, effects and natural sounds the record rose in layers until it became something else altogether. Originally meant to be in several movements, the piece suggested itself to flow in long stretches, building up to its eventual conclusion. 

 This record differs from the first Strindberg album in that the voice aspect is not in the usual sense you would expect. On this record it exists as an instrument. It's part of the ritual. It makes its own ghostly presence known in the very first sound. As Jake Berry described the sound, he said it was a, "Whole different world." 

 John Cage said, “If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.” The Strindberg's are always reaching for that new experience. That new sound. If space can be explored, why not sound?

Chris Mansel, 12-11-2011

The Strindbergs - Ghost Thresholds and Etudes

available at: The Strindbergs

The sound poetry of Ghost Thresholds and Etudes by the Strindbergs will “haunt your face,” to quote “Kiss the Rough Things,” the first track of this astonishing album. This subtle and jarring poemusic lurks; it finds its way into the hidden recesses of your consciousness, and takes up permanent residence in the attics of your soul. 

The unexpected is the norm among these ghosts; bees are “arriving vectors of honey/ in the windows (“The Last Architectural Grasp of the Hive”) and “an assassin can originate anywhere” (“Reversal”). These ghosts are no friendly cartoons, but terrifying wraiths in a world where fire and flood may shift places at any moment, as “branches ignite and fuse / a flood will find you on the road” (“Kiss the Rough Things”).

The music, by Chris Mansel, waxes and wanes with Jake Berry’s vocals like moon and tide. This insistent music, startling and plaintive, is featured in the album’s two instrumental tracks. The other eight tracks include The Strindbergs’ vivid poetry—chanted, dirged, and bardically sung—as dark and painful as the band’s namesake. 

Peopled with widows, birds, insects, angels (“Erosion is so simple –forever alive / in a sparrow” — “Angels on High Tension Cables”), this poemusic seeks the strange juxtaposition, the unexpected noun. It is music and poetry to return to often, for a needed jolt of the unusual. Listen at the peril of your comfort; listen for your fix of experiment; listen to hear your deepest fear and mirror. But listen.

Larissa Shmailo (In Paran; The No-Net World; Exorcism)

released 01 December 2011 
Chris Mansel – music, sound and effects 
Jake Berry – vocals, piano on Instrumental No. 2 

all songs written by Chris Mansel and Jake Berry 
except Instrumental No. 1 – written by Chris Mansel 

Recorded, mixed and mastered in November 2011 

Music, sound, audio tracks and effects written and recorded by Chris Mansel at Rabid Bear Studios, Florence, AL 

Words, vocals, and piano on Instrumental No. 2 written and recorded by Jake Berry at 9th Street Laboratories, Florence, AL 

Photographs by Chris Mansel 

Dilapidation Impromptu - Indentions on the North Face of Everest

Indentions On The North Face of Everest tells a story both sonic and verbally. The titles suggest the title of each stanza and from there you listen and as the piece opens you may be reticent but it will show dimensions like the great mountain itself shadowed and hidden in the mist. Music critic Alex Ross writes, "Music is too personal a medium to support an absolute hierarchy of values. The best music is the music that persuades us that there is no other music in the world."

The tracks can be heard at SoundCloud by clicking on the names of the tracks.

1. Inner Route
2. Speak As They Do
3. Separation From Module....Last Breath
4. Falling It Doesn't Seem Like Snow