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

IMPERMANENCE - ARITO

Impermanence is a collaboration between Chris Mansel and Jake Berry. For their first album, Arito, Mansel  sent Berry a set of core tracks composed of layers of sound, music and noise along with brief recordings of Mansel reading his poetry. Berry added various instruments including guitar, bass, keyboards, and percussion. After passing mixes of the tracks back and forth until both members of the band were satisfied with the results they were mastered at 9th Street Laboratories. The cover art is from a painting by Carrie Mansel. The album can be downloaded free at the Impermanence page at LastFM. Click here to go to the page.

Transfiguration Blues

Maxwell D. Russell - guitars

Wayne Sides - keyboards

Jake Berry - bass

produced by Ascension Brothers

and Chris Mansel

mixed and mastered by

Jake Berry in August 2009

at 9th Street Laboratories

Florence, Alabama

photography by Wayne Sides

contact:

ascensionbrothers@gmx.com

Available for purchase now at Amazon.com/mp3 and iTunes and eMusic.

Here is some background to the album’s origins by Jake Berry (writing to Jeffrey Sides via email and copied here from Jeffrey's Facebook page):

“Two years ago, perhaps a little more or less, Max (Maxwell D. Russell) recorded four long solo guitar tracks. I think they might have been for a project that was never completed. One night when he was here working on songs for another album he mentioned the tracks and suggested they might be something we could work with for an Ascension Brothers album. I was eager to hear the tracks, but booth of us were involved in multiple projects as usual and I never managed to get them from him. Then a few months ago Chris Mansel and his daughter were visiting Max at his music shop and Max gave Chris the tracks. Chris made films of three of the tracks just as they were. They can be seen and heard on Youtube via the following links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WGkB4TMOds

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHZeJNNqZPU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOlaB31xckI

These are the raw tracks just as he recorded them. Chris brought a copy of the CD of all four recordings. I loaded those into the recording program on my computer and invited Wayne Sides to add keyboards (Wayne and I founded the Ascension Brothers in the late 1990s). Wayne recorded a keyboard track to accompany the first of Max's tracks. Then a photography project called him away. Looking back through my old files I discovered that we had recorded and entire Ascension Brothers album that had never been released. These contained multiple keyboard tracks, all played by Wayne. I asked his permission to extract some of them and use them in the new context. He agreed.

The next challenge was to find tracks that contained notes that were primarily consonant with Max's tracks. Once this was completed I had to decide how broad the harmonies might be and how much dissonance to leave or add. There was also an issue with dynamics. I had to choose sections, or sometimes individual notes that worked dynamically with what Max had recorded. Once that was accomplished there was a matter of how to process both Max's tracks and Wayne's in order to make them blend in one way or another. Most of the time I simply applied layers of reverb and echo, but sometimes, I added tremolo, flanger, wah-wah, and other effects as well some pitch shifting. In the last case this meant adding a track that was a duplicate of the original, but then shifting the pitch above or below by a third or a forth or so on. The idea throughout was to come up with an original work that was sourced in the original tracks, but had become a new piece entirely. When I had a rough initial mix of their tracks I added bass tracks to each of the songs myself and put those tracks through a similar process of working with effects. All of this involved a great deal of editing. It is in a sense a means of composing with available music. This happens all the times with various forms that use the mashup process - reggae dub and dubstep, as well as various forms of ambient music are examples of where this technique has been applied.

After all the tracks were recorded, processed and edited I shifted to mastering them so that the tracks could be effected all in the same way. This would have the effect of making them sound even more like a single piece of music. At every phase there was a great deal of trial and error. How much consonance, how much dissonance, at what point should individual parts be panned apart or panned together, how many layers, at what pint should one instrument rise out of the mix and then recede and so on. Working for several hours each day I was able to complete the album in about three weeks.

I don't think there is anything revolutionary about what I was doing, but what we have always tried to do with The Ascension Brothers is keep in mind previous similar music, from ancient music like Gregorian chant and the Notre Dame school of composers to Indian Ragas to 20th century composition on up to the Ambient work of artists like Bran Eno, Harold Budd and Daniel Lanois among others. The significant thing we wanted to do differently was to add an edge to what we were doing so that, in the words of Mike Miskowski regarding an earlier recording the music 'would lull you to sleep then rip your brain out.' We want to generate a comfortable sonic atmosphere that the listener can use as background if he or she liked, but also something that will reward close attention.”

Arc of a Chord : Sine 1-5 - Catachthonia

 

Recorded in November 2005

in Espoo, Finland and Florence, AL, USA

Jukka-Pekka Kervinen - stochastic processing

Jake Berry - effects guitar

Produced, mixed and edited by Kervinen and Berry

©2006, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen and Jake Berry

To open a page where you can download this album free click here.

The Blood Paradox Variations - Catachthonia

 

cover art: Jukka-Pekka Kervinen and Jake Berry

recorded during the summer and fall of 2005
in Florence, AL, USA and Espoo, Finland

Original recordings of Jake Berry performing
The Blood Paradoxes in Florence were sent by
e-mail to Jukka-Pekka Kervinenom in Espoo
who digitially processed them based on granular
synthesis (a method in which sound is generated
using very large amounts of very small extracts of
the original sound grouped stochastically to
form a sound cloud).These recordings were then
e-mailed to Berrywho added his performances to
selections from Kervinen’s compositions , mixed
and edited the collection.

©2005, Jake Berry and Jukka-Pekka Kervinen