Lanterna - Backyards - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Hidden Drives is the latest offering from Lanterna, the (mostly) instrumental long running side project of guitarist Henry Frayne. Since the mid-80s Frayne has played in and around Champaign, IL with various electronic and dream pop bands such as The Syndicate, ¡Ack-Ack!, Area, and The Moon Seven Times. His experiences in these bands influenced every song on Hidden Drives, which features more electric guitar and synthesizer than his previous albums. Returning to his long maintained notebooks and cassettes filled with song ideas, Frayne regards the new album tracks as ideas that might have needed a bit more time, give or take a decade, to come together. A song like InchMaine 262Inch (referring to InchSong Idea 262Inch) needed a final section which came about when he accidentally struck an open low E string while trying a new chord pattern. The acoustic guitar driven InchChagrin BoulevardInch existed as a fragment at the end of a cassette tape for many years, with Frayne relying on his memory for the rest of the song. And the album's title track is just three rich chords played on an old analog synth. Frayne says, InchI had to figure out how to arrange the chords on the guitar to retain those ringing notes for the recording and also to imagine the twists and turns of the rest of the song.Inch The heavily atmospheric work on Hidden Drives, written on an old Gibson SG with or without cascading digital echoes suggesting additional harmonies and melody lines, places it amongst current ambient and spacious guitar soli genres, with a singular depth of it's own.

Lanterna - Highways [COMPACT DISCS] date 03/02/2004

The seventh in the series of Sonic Youth's SYR documents unearths even more fruit from the fields of Sonic improvisational/compositional love. On the heels of a lengthy investigation into their relationship to 20th Century classical music, the band took advantage of their millennial crossroads in 2000 via the adventurous, then-newfound All Tomorrow's Parties festival in the UK, on invitation from Mogwai. Besides it being historical as their last show as a foursome until 2006, it stands as a wholly unique set that not only delved into instrumental previews of the forthcoming NYC Ghosts And Flowers, but also featured an opening 20 minute group interpretation of a solo composition Thurston had performed at NYC's late/beloved venue The Cooler.With Thurston and Lee both sporting electric 12-strings, and Kim on her Eterna, the piece was set-listed as InchNew DroneInch, and took a right turn from the initial instrumental plan with Kim's added intonings that reflected on Sylvia Plath's relationship to her husband, hence retitled InchJ'Accuse Ted HughesInch. It's a sublimely spaced out bit of one-chord introspection, though perhaps not what the festival punters were looking for at that moment. Certainly not the irked Melody Maker scribe who headlined his review InchGoodbye 20th Century/Goodbye TalentInch, a screencap of which appears on the sleeve of this 2008 . Sparks infamously declared InchTalent Is An AssetInch, and one of SY's great ones was to give their deep listener faction something new and unheard to chew on. Initially live streamed in not-so-great quality, the SYR 7 mix ably accents the thunderous, phased crescendos that ebb and flow here.The flip of this brings Jim O'Rourke into the fold with a piece for a never-completed collaboration with French clothing designer Agnes B. Recorded in 2003 in SY's home turf of Echo Canyon in downtown Manhattan, this 18 minute p