The Ephemeron Loop - Psychonautic Escapism - VINYL LP

September 23rd is the first in William Basinski's new Arcadia Archive series. Recorded in September 1982 in his first loft in the pre-gentrified DUMBO neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, September 23rd is a recently unearthed early entry in what has become a hugely inspirational and influential catalog. Built from a piano piece that Basinski composed in high school in the mid-1970s, September 23rd quickly evolved into a vastly different work. As Basinski explains InchThe original piano recordings were made on on a piano belonging to my downstairs neighbor, John Epperson - later known more famously as world-renowned drag artist, Lypsinka - at 351 Jay Street aka Casa Degli Artisti, our first loft in New York. It was recoded with a little portable (probably Radio Shack) cassette deck sitting on the piano as I improvised a piece I had been working on since high school. It was pretty terrible, but when I did the John Giorno/William Burroughs cut-up technique, suddenly I had something to put through the Frippertronics loop and feedback loop tape delay system - and boy did I get results. A very prolific time for a young, wacked-out queen in NYC.Inch

Composer and Rome Prize winner Christopher Trapani releases InchHorizontal Drift,Inch a collection of six works written for custom instruments that explore rich corners of microtonal tuning, timbre, and electronic processing. Featuring performers Max Haft, Daniel Lippel, Amy Advocat, Marilyn Nonken, and Marco Fusi in music for vioara cu goarna (Inchviolin with hornInch), quarter-tone guitar, Bohlen-Pierce clarinet, piano scordatura, Midi-controlled Fokker organ, and viola d'amore, Trapani revels in sound worlds that challenge listener expectations and reveal new expressive possibilities. InchSome time around 2015, I started to wonder if the received wisdom of the concert music circuit might not be out of date. Listeners now seem far more likely to engage with a new work online, streaming a single recorded track, than to hear a work live in concert. The publication/performance model, relying on new interpreters to pick up old pieces for similar instruments, has started to seem increasingly anachronistic-or even quixotic, given the abundance of options to choose from. Shifting my strategy, I decided to concentrate on writing music that isn't necessarily meant to circulate to other performers. Working closely with specific musicians on their custom-made instruments, I would create uniquely-tailored showpieces for a few gifted soloists who share my passion for rare tunings and timbres. This album is the fruit of those collaborations...Inch

Style-wise, it's incredibly different, going back to thinking about guitars and guitar sounds. Obviously you have to take into consideration things like percussive elements such as drums, which I haven't been using in my other projects; but this is the mindset that makes up Loop. So says Robert Hampson, the indefatigable visionary behind inspirational sonic architects Loop, whose eagerly anticipated fourth LP Sonancy (Latin for Inchto create noiseInch) is the perfect document for these strange times. Dynamic, dystopian, righteously angry and unashamedly Loop-ian, it's an album that marks a vital re-emergence for Hampson and Co. Formed in South London in the mid-1980s, Loop blazed a trail with their potent mix of motorik beats and heavy guitar riffs, recording a trio of brilliant albums that set the indie charts alight before imploding in 1990 after the of album number three, A Gilded Eternity. As critics enthused at the time, Loop were the sound of Suicide jamming with the Stooges aboard a spaceship built by Hawkwind and piloted by CAN. They were post-psychedelic, pre-shoegaze figureheads in a world of anodyne pop jangle and baggy rhythms, and even their closest contemporaries like Spacemen 3 and My Bloody Valentine didn't plough such a distinctive furrow as theirs.