Earthen Sea - Grass And Trees - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Jacob Long's 2017 recordings under the Earthen Sea moniker deepen his compelling synthesis of shadowy rhythms and opaque atmospherics, drawing on the most potent qualities of melancholic ambient and dub techno. An Act Of Love follows 2015's Ink, released via Ital's Lovers Rock imprint, and was inspired by internal tribulations and the experience of exploring an empty nocturnal metropolis. Careful waves of tones drift and decay; beats materialize and pulse across twilit landscapes; a noir mood reigns. Given Long's background as bassist for revelatory tribalpunk trio MI AMI, this album showcases a musician in the midst of transcendent redefinition, crafting an immersive language of texture and motion. Album Tracks 1. The Present Mist 2. About That Time 3. Delicately in the Sunlight 4. Apparent Lushness 5. Exuberant Burning 6. Above the Clouds 7. The Flats, 1975 8. Also An Act of Love

2010 from the mysterious Portland ensemble with two new fetid death rituals scraped from the crypt. Each of these tracks averages around fourteen minutes, an extended death-rattle formed from black glacial riffs suspended in space, tectonic percussive rumbles, anguished shrieks of torment and abject suffering, deep guttural demon-toad throat singing, and endless sheets of glistening metallic feedback that spill and drift to the far edges of their extreme time-stretched ambient doom, a crumbling, blighted majesty, noxious ambient blackdoom adrift on putrescent tides. Freed of This Flesh inhabits the same sort of black-tar depths as the likes of Burning Witch, Monarch, Khanate, and Bunkur while stripping the slo-mo heaviness into their own twisted, skeletal configuration. Album Tracks 1. Hollow 2. Ashes

Emerald Sea, the third album from New York-based audiovisual project Sound of Ceres, tells the story of how the universe comes to know itself. Rendered in dynamic, ambitious orchestral passages, it forms the basis of future stage performances intended to draw it's half-submerged narrative into the visual sphere. In it's dreamlike impressions, it could also be the soundtrack to a long-forgotten early musical film - an experience that delighted and transported audiences and then vanished from record, surviving only in the imprint of memory. Written in three acts, Emerald Sea follows two deities who trail each other through the furthest reaches of experience. There is the Universe, all that exists, voiced by performance artist Marina Abramovic. And there is Venus, transformer of matter and avatar of love, sung by the group's lead vocalist Karen Hover (who goes by k). Through a dazzling suite of songs inspired by Les Baxter's midcentury exotica, Maurice Ravel's ballet Daphnis et Chloé, and Gustav Holst's The Planets, Emerald Sea studies intimacy on both an interpersonal scale and a cosmological one. Connection and severance, joy and grief, wonder and bewilderment all tumble through it's scope. In the widest frame, the universe begins, meets itself, and ends. In the closest frame, two people encounter each other, grow close, and then separate. These stories are two views of the same fractal. In every intimacy human beings cultivate, every rush of connection, no matter how fleeting, we reenact the universe for ourselves. InchI envisioned myself journeying through these different realms - space, the land, the sea, the heavens - and following Marina's character,Inch says k. InchI always saw her as a shadow figure that I couldn't quite figure out.Inch Ryan says, InchThe album's story is an allegory for the emergence of mind and meaning from the matter of the universe, and it's