We’ve been following this project and recommend you watch the live performances (also included below) of stone | piece that we shared in December, as well as the more recent, darkly cinematic laundry | blood. Each instalment has deepened the sense of a group working at the outer edges of what string instruments, voices, and analog tape can do together — and the finished album delivers on all of that promise.
BODY SOUND was assembled across sessions at International Anthem’s Iron Street studios, Shirk Studios in Chicago, and Boyd’s Jig and Reel in Knoxville during this year’s Big Ears Festival, with engineer and co-producer Dave Vettraino shaping the recordings. The trio then edited and reshaped the material by hand, employing multiple analog tape machines to create loops that open up new pathways of improvisation — layering intuitive material into meticulously crafted compositions. Track titles are adapted from Yoko Ono’s classic book of text scores Grapefruit.
New single burning | counting (sleeping) captures the album’s push and pull between density and stillness. As Whitney Johnson explains: “We all like to push the limits of our instruments, and this piece walks the razor edge at times, maintaining tonality while blowing out the timbre and hitting the rhythm on the front edge of the beat until it almost wants to fragment, disintegrate.”
All three musicians are individually rooted in deep sound exploration and cross-genre collaboration — Stewart’s recent International Anthem solo album When the Distance is Blue among the highlights — and their influences range as far as the mountains of Donegal, Midwestern basement noise, and the revelatory expanse of the Nurse With Wound list. But the heart of BODY SOUND is listening and reacting: deep, melancholy, and triumphant, it comes across like a kind of lost or amalgamated folk music.
The trio host a virtual Bandcamp listening party at 12pm CST today, and head out on tour next month across the East Coast US, with a hometown Chicago show, before dates in Europe and the UK.
April 22 – Pittsburgh PA – Mattress FactoryApril 23 – East Meredith NY – West Kortright Center April 26 – Philadelphia PA – First Unitarian Church, Side ChapelApril 27 – Baltimore MD – 2640 Space April 28 – Kingston, NY – Tubby’sApril 29 – Portland ME – Washington BathsApril 30 – Brattleboro VT – Epsilon SpiresMay 1 – North Adams MA – Tourists WelcomeMay 2 – Brooklyn NY – Long Play FestivalMay 7 – Chicago IL – ConstellationJune 3 – Stockholm SE – FaschingJune 4 – Berlin, DE – Kieszalon @ Das MinskJune 6 – London UK – Cafe OtoJune 9 – Poitiers FR – Conforte Moderne
Source: klofmag.com