Marc Barreca - A Penchant For The Useless - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

2017 . Marc Barreca's seventh solo album for Palace of Lights extends his work with a broader and deeper palette of synthesized and sampled sound, including sources as diverse as prepared guitars, pianos, Indonesian metallophones and glass harmonica. The music of Aberrant Lens employs long MIDI delays, synced MIDI processing via MAX for Live and extreme warping of disparate looped sound sources driven into entirely new states. The results are new, coherent aural structures music that questions traditional definitions of ambient and electronic forms. And, to the educated ear, within this search for innovation and experimentation Aberrant Lens reveals many of Barreca's earliest influences. Even when integrated in thoroughly non-retro compositions, the hints of homage to Cluster and the first Fripp & Eno releases inhabit these twelve new settings.

With The Empty Bridge, Marc Barreca again exploits his distinct talent for translating landscapes into sound. The music was created in and reflects the influence of contrasting environments-the beauty and stillness of the Cascade Mountains and the muted industrial nightscape of the Duwamish Waterway, complete with it's massive, now-condemned, empty freeway bridge. The pieces are sculpted from layers of synthesized and sampled instruments, field recordings and processed vinyl. With these sources, Barreca achieves a level of compositional sophistication that deftly combines elements of ambient, drone, noise, and sound art with contrapuntal lines running above and below the dense and shifting aural environments. Composed during a period of tranquil isolation-isolation created by a global pandemic, a broken concrete link to the city, and a remote mountain cabin-The Empty Bridge evokes immersive, evolving, contrasting landscapes.

In his novel The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro describes a mist of forgetfulness descending on the people, obscuring memory but not distorting historic truth.In contrast, Marc Barreca finds inspiration for the pieces of A Discourse Of Mist, not in forgotten truths but false science, false elements and a history of rumor, conjecture and untruth. Beyond Barreca's frequent exploration of obscure images, the subjects here are not simply obscure but literally false.Unexpectedly melodic, elegant, wide-ranging in tempo and coloration, A Discourse Of Mist exposes a haze of untruth within a deeply layered soundstage. Intriguing sonic images emerge from a vibrant alchemy manipulated rich audio strata; hundreds of translucent layers; handbuilt samples; synthesizer-based loops; contrasts in light and dark merged as a beautiful, false world construct. These sculpted, coherent, short-form pieces foster a narrative of clarity over misconception, comprehension over misunderstanding, reality over falsehood.InchWidescreen, pastoral visions of ambient music by West Coast US pioneer Marc Barreca of Savant esteem. RIYL Eno, K. Leimer, Phillip Jeck.Inch -Boomkat