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A Midsummer's Night

by orchestramaxfieldparrish

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it just is 23:00

about

I dreamed this dream and I still dream of it and I will dream of it sometime again. Everything repeats itself and everything will be reincarnated, and my dreams will be your dreams...

- Arseny Tarkovsky





from musiquemachine:

orchestramaxfieldparrish - A Midsummer's Night [Faith Strange - 2017

A Midsummer's Night, released in 2016, is three years later still the most recent work from avant-ambient guitarist Mike Fazio's orchestramaxfieldparrish alias. Like all of Fazio's music, it is self released on his own Faith Strange label in a limited edition, an edition of 100 copies in this case. As a long time fan of Fazio's experimental guitarscapes, I am honored to own a copy.

The liner notes describe these pieces as 'music for prepared guitar & treatments', except for the last piece, which uses a piano. Fazio's digital processing transforms the guitar into a refined etheric mist, an unreal smooth momentum of astral dimensions. His plucks are stuttered and finely sliced into thousands of glittering granular beads, artificially charged with color and tone. The peak of brightness and volume near the end of opener "Head to Heart" is an exhilarating white rush of resonance, a manic thrill of godlike delusion.

As always, Fazio is content to dwell within free rhythm space, to emerge from the opacity of silence and then retreat back into it, to faintly tint the air of the space but leave it transparent. From swell to swell we move, happening at times upon chords and discordant shrouds. The rattling of strings is occasionally audible, but rarely a clear pluck or the punctuated beginning of a note, as this would disrupt the fluid glide of its unfolding.

Passages of his music come close to the lush compositions of melancholic classical ambient masters like Kyle Bobby Dunn or Stars of the Lid, who similarly utilize processed acoustic instruments. However, these artists favor gradually unfolding structured melodies in their work, and Fazio's tendency is toward a kind of exploratory anarchy, a continuous testing of the abyssal waters, a divination technique from which entities of ambiguous, asymmetric form emerge.

By the third piece, we've completely left the realm of recognizable guitar playing, and the sound is a howling solar wind, a metallic billowing with such a crisp, subtlely dimensioned layering that I would swear it was acoustic in nature. Further into the dreamlike and farther from the familiar, this point in the album is the deepest of night where emotions have distorted under the crushing weight of vertiginous currents.

The glittering blackness of lengthy closer "It Just Is" is truly nightmarish, an expression of fear and smallness in the face of all consuming vacuum. Perhaps a pessimistic ending, I am struck by Fazio's uninhibited spirit of embracing darkness. Snaking, smoking and eerie, this is certainly the most difficult piece on the album.

Fazio has surely stepped up his trademark methods of composition for this album, one of the most starkly vibrant and expressive of his career. His gift for morose melody is more thoroughly employed here, one of his most focused and directed feeling sets. While free association remains the core of his approach, I can really feel the emotional drive behind the choices he made for this album.

Now to track down the newest full lengths from his A Guide for Reason and Mike Fazio aliases!

5 stars

Josh Landry



from textura:

orchestramaxfieldparrish: Instant Light Faith Strange Recordings
orchestramaxfieldparrish: A Midsummer's Night Faith Strange Recordings

Of all the group and solo projects with which Mike Fazio has been involved (A Guide For Reason and Gods of Electricity, to name but two), it's his orchestramaxfieldparrish that is my favourite. In fact, so dazzled was I by 2008's The Silent Breath of Emptiness, I contacted him about the possibility of creating something for textura's first label release, Kubla Khan; not only did he contribute the magnificent “Waning Moon Over Sunless Sea” to it, he mastered the album, too. Subsequent to that, Fazio released the mesmerizing Crossing of Shadows in 2007, as well as To The Last Man / Index Of Dreaming, though that set appeared in 2009 under the orchestramaxfieldparrish presents ÆRA alias. Issued on his own Faith Strange imprint, as much of his output is, Fazio has just made two new orchestramaxfieldparrish releases available, both of them well worthy of one's attention and equally distinguished examples of his highly developed artistry.

Though different instruments are used on the four tracks of A Midsummer's Night, an impression of unity is achieved when processing treatments are applied liberally to all four. Two pieces were created using prepared archtop guitar, another pizzicato lute guitar and mellophone, and the fourth piano. The opening “Head To Heart” illustrates Fazio's mastery at sculpting sound and handling pacing and dynamics. For nine minutes, shimmering swaths of archtop guitar advance and recede, the thrum and rumble of the instrument suggestive of waves rippling ashore. The sound tapestry expands on “In These Long Years” when rapid, spidery strums of the pizzicato lute guitar are countered by the muted, horn-like murmur of the mellophone, whereas the treatments applied to piano on the twenty-three-minute “It Just Is” radically transform the instrument into an uninterrupted, pulsating stream wherein piano clusters occasionally surface. In all four settings, sounds advance with a precision that feels almost scientifically calibrated, the elements' movements managed by Fazio with the kind of sensitivity that comes from a lifetime of musical practice.

Though recording info beyond that already mentioned doesn't appear on A Midsummer's Night, one guesses it's the more recently recorded of the two sets when details included with Instant Light clarify that its two parts were recorded in 2013 and 2009, respectively; a note on the inner sleeve reveals that Instant Light comprises “private, archival works not originally intended for release,” and a detailed account of the background leading up to the release appears, too. The range of instruments on Instant Light is also greater than On A Midsummer's Night, with Fazio augmenting his customary electric guitar (prepared, processed, glissando, treated) with singing bowls, metals, electronics, modular synthesis, and field recordings (collected between 1988 and 2013).

The presence of singing bowls and field-recorded rain on “...They Would Fly Upwards” immediately individuates Instant Light from A Midsummer's Night. Not only is the sound palette different, but there's also a tonal shift whereby the former's direct connection to the physical world makes the latter seem more ethereal by comparison; further to that, the resonant ping of the bowls lends the peaceful setting an almost Gamelan character, something absent on the other recording. Far stormier is “And Be Carried Off and Vanish,” which also threads generous helpings of Fazio's guitar playing and bold electronic treatments into a swirling mix that grows ever more celestial as it advances towards its nineteen-minute end. The recording's so-called second part “When Your Dreams of a Perfect Tomorrow Come True” perpetuates the texturally rich soundscaping style of the first with shimmering, metal-tinged surges that convulse, reverberate, and billow with controlled regularity.

If there's anything regrettable about this exceptional pair, it's that only 100 physical copies of each have been produced (though they are available digitally, too). In a perfect world, there would be a place for explorative music of such genuine quality in thousands of receptive listeners' homes, but such a world, alas, doesn't seem to be the one we inhabit.

November 2016

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released October 23, 2016

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faith strange New York, New York

faith strange was originally started in 1992 as a private imprint for the recorded output of the critically acclaimed NYC group life with the lions.

It has since been modified as a small imprint for several inter-related artist's projects.

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