The Retail Sectors
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KUBLA KHAN Ryan Francesconi & Lili De La Mora |
VIDEO / BACKGROUND / ARTISTS / REVIEWS
TRACK LISTING
1. The Retail Sectors: “Precarious Awakening” (5:51)
2. Alexander Turnquist: “Fragments Vaulted Like Rebounding Hail” (17:25)
3. Ryan Francesconi: “Parables” (5:41)
4. Ryan Francesconi & Lili De La Mora: “Green To Red” (3:10)
5. Ryan Francesconi: “Deep Rivers Run Quiet” (4:13)
6. orchestramaxfieldparrish: “Waning Moon Over Sunless Sea” (18:44)
7. The Retail Sectors: “The Ever-Changing Scene” (6:46)
"Green To Red" by Ryan Francesconi & Lili De La Mora
Video created by Melissa F Clarke
FIRST-YEAR UNIVERSITY STUDENTS enrolled in English Literature 101 invariably read Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats but the poetic work that likely lodges itself in memory most of all is Samuel Taylor Coleridge's “Kubla Khan, or a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment,” and not just because the author himself claimed it was inspired by an opium-induced dream. Written in 1797 and first published in 1816, the poem includes imagery so vivid it lends the work an hallucinatory quality that sets it apart from all other Romantic poetry, and the opening lines alone can entrance even the most resistant student:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Some may recognize Xanadu from Orson Welles' Citizen Kane as the name of the immense estate that Charles Foster Kane built for his second wife Susan Alexander (who came to regard it as nothing more than a fortress of solitude from which she had to escape). Needless to say, we at textura were captivated by the poem when we first read it all those years ago—so much so that when we decided to establish a textura label we immediately thought of Coleridge's poem and its rich potential as an inspirational midwife for musical work. And so it came to pass that four stylistically-diverse artists—Alexander Turnquist, The Retail Sectors, orchestramaxfieldparrish, and Ryan Francesconi & Lili De La Mora—contributed their abundant artistry to textura's premiere release in the form of unique interpretive responses to the poem.
Some of the artists drew upon the majestic spirit of Coleridge's poem while others used a particularly evocative passage as a conceptual springboard. The Retail Sectors bookends the hour-long recording with two epic samplings of Kentaro Togawa's signature instrumental rock. In the first, “Precarious Awakening,” intricate guitar and bass lines unite for an elegant pas de deux as the piece moves through a series of ever-intensifying climaxes; the ponderous second, “The Ever-Changing Scene,” brings the recording to a graceful close but not before exposing the listener once more to Togawa's smoldering attack. At the recording's center, Ryan Francesconi & Lili De La Mora present the wistful and alluring vocal ballad “Green To Red” while Ryan frames it with two lovely guitar meditations, “Parables” and “Deep Rivers Run Quiet.” The first, the more uptempo of the two, spotlights the crystalline and rather harp-like sound of his deft acoustic picking; true to its title, the second adopts a more ruminative mien. In contrast to those song-structured pieces, Alexander Turnquist and orchestramaxfieldparrish (Mike Fazio) contribute long-form soundscapes that are simultaneously immersive and transportive. In the seventeen-minute “Fragments Vaulted Like Rebounding Hail,” Turnquist uses 12-string acoustic guitar, toy xylophone, samplers, and laptop to produce an initially turbulent and ultimately peaceful galaxy of rustling static and flicker, while Fazio's heavily-processed pedal steel guitar creates a celestial realm of shimmering streams, slow-burning tones, and glistening waves in “Waning Moon Over Sunless Sea.”
Despite the artists' stylistic differences, Kubla Khan's admittedly disparate parts coalesce to deliver a resplendent listening experience that feels immensely satisfying and whole.
Ryan Francesconi & Lili De La Mora
Seattle resident, multi-instrumentalist, and CalArts graduate (degrees in Guitar, Composition, and Electronic Music) Ryan Francesconi brings a deep love of Balkan folk music and ambient acoustic music to his solo releases under the RF moniker and his collaborative work with vocalist Lili De La Mora (their remarkable debut collection Eleven Continents) and Joanna Newsom (whose harp playing also graces the duo's album). In his productions, Francesconi applies subtle electronic treatments to field recordings, vocals, and classical instrumentation to produce rich and highly personalized work.
orchestramaxfieldparrish
Since 1999, Mike Fazio has issued solo material under the orchestramaxfieldparrish guise and since 2005 been active as one-half of the experimental ambient-industrial outfit Gods of Electricity. Fazio's symphonic sculpting of electric guitar- and pedal steel guitar-generated sounds is heard to marvelous effect on the frozen vistas of orchestral sweep comprising his recent release The Silent Breath of Emptiness. Drifting chords and sustained tones coalesce into metallic soundscapes of lyrical beauty during the work's five connecting parts.
The Retail Sectors
Kentaro Togawa, the one-man band behind The Retail Sectors, creates music of remarkably rich variety without straying from his trademark guitar-bass-drums set-up. In his tracks, Togawa, who also heads up the Japan-based label Symbolic Interaction, weds pristine guitar lattices to a blistering attack. His recently issued The Starlight Silent Night may be the most perfectly-realized distillation of The Retail Sectors' sound to date.
Alexander Turnquist
Alexander Turnquist is a New York-based acoustic guitarist and sound sculptor whose Faint at the Loudest Hour and Apneic have garnered considerable acclaim (Pitchfork gave the former an 8.2 rating). Given the apparent ease with which he can produce rapidly-picked cyclical patterns of entrancing, raga-like design, it's understandable that his name is mentioned alongside James Blackshaw and Sir Richard Bishop but Turnquist—as exemplified by the meditative Apneic and his amazing Kubla Khan contribution—often ventures beyond strict acoustic guitar playing for more unconventional territory.
Tokafi (Tobias Fischer), October 16, 2008:
"Most people think of music journalism as merely passing judgement. Canadian print magazine textura, however, has taken a completely different route. Far more interested in providing information than doling out meaningless ratings and focusing on essential lines of artistic development instead of short-lived phenomena, the Ontario-based publication has established itself as a source of inspiration for anyone with an inclination for sound art and experimental electronica—and as a serious threat to purses incapable of handling all the compulsive CD orders resulting from regular reading.
If the editorial team has now decided to enter the supposedly saturated label market, this neither comes as a big surprise nor as a random act dictated by a fleeting fancy. The impulse of finding out about interesting new artists on paper and the desire to listen to their music are closely connected, after all. And since well-reasoned subjectivity has thankfully replaced cool, market-oriented pseudo-objectivity in deciding on cover stories and review coverage, the case for a magazine to feature the same acts both through stories and physical releases is clear: artists and media have turned into partners, mutually supporting each other and shaping overlapping scenes and communities based on shared aesthetics and a need for uncompromising sounds.
As Kubla Khan proves, predominantly personal preferences need not contradict coherent creative concepts either. Admittedly, the artist roster for this four-way split draws a decidedly diverse line-up from textura's editorial innards: typographically nightmarishly-titled orchestramaxfieldparrish, Japanese one-man Post-Rock project The Retail Sectors, ambitious folk duo Ryan Francesconi and Lili De La Mora as well as New York'ean sound scuptor Alexander Turnquist have all been featured on their pages before. But two distinct selection criteria prevent the album from falling into arbitrariness.
On the one hand, there's the obvious outward leitmotif of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's eponymous, drug-induced hallucinatory poem. Its lines represent a point of departure for the participating composers, whose stylistic differences are suddenly carefully aligned by the joint goal of approximating the lyrical mystery of these verses through sound. In fact, the musical distinctions serve to sharpen one's perception of the words more than a more smoothly-styled sampler ever could: The Retail Sectors' plaintive minimalism and elated ecstasy and the shimmering, beautifully brittle love letters of Francesconi/De La Mora detect constant change in Coleridge's verbal magic, while Turnquists's epic spatial ruminations and the orchestramaxfieldparris's darkly peaceful and amorphously floating 18-minute wonder-world underline its enigmatic, ambivalently anthemic nature.
Less pronounced and yet equally essential is the fact that all of the artists involved use the Guitar as their main compositional tool. In the textural sections of the album, this factor sometimes dies down to a mere echo of its original timbre or to short, fragmented figments of strummed strings or melodic picking—but it always remains a clearly audible, distinctly recognizable element. Kubla Khan therefore not only allows readers an enlightening juxtaposition of some of their favorite projects, but also offers a glimpse of the very plurality of a scene all too often lazily summarized under the tag of “experimental Guitar.”
Already, the poles of this simplified term have started moving towards each other, driven by their inherently similar approaches and fruitfully pollinated by their idiosyncrasies. It is the task of the media to uncover these trends and to establish links between seemingly unconnected camps. By boldly following the latter ideal and ignoring the traditional allocation of tasks for magazines, labels and artists, textura has taken another step in establishing music journalism as a positive rather than a judgmental force—and in presenting themselves as a fully-fledged crossbreed of record company and print mag."
The Milk Factory (Bruno Lasier), September 30, 2008:
"Already a successful music magazine, textura is now launching a new imprint, and releasing its first album. Kubla Khan takes its name from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's classic nineteenth-century poem Kubla Khan, Or A Vision In A Dream, A Fragment, which was, according to Coleridge, inspired by an opium-induced dream. The poem also serves as a thread to the seven tracks featured on the album, as each song takes a particular aspect of the poem and is built as a response to it, or an interpretation of it, by the respective artists.
Four very different acts have taken on the challenge and brought their own musical vision to the project, from the expensive guitar-laden dense rock of The Retail Sectors and the vast sonic stretches of orchestramaxfieldparrish to the delicate folk flourishes of Seattle-based Ryan Francesconi, who contributes two solo tracks here plus one with vocalist Lili De La Mora, and the exquisite sound assemblages of New York's Alexander Turnquist. The focus of the album is therefore very much centred on experimental guitar work in one form or another, and while the scopes of the artists involved vary greatly, there is a surprising impression of consistency throughout Kubla Khan.
The album is bookended by compositions from Japanese artist and Symbolic Interaction label head Kentaro Togawa, who single-handedly spearheads The Retail Sectors. "Precarious Awakening," which opens, and "The Ever-Changing Scene," which concludes, are in many ways sister tracks, each building up momentum from originally spacious and crystalline formations, where shimmering guitars draw gentle shapes over an increasingly potent drum section, especially on the former. Little by little, the compositions gain in riches and depth until Togawa pushes into more distorted and altogether less clearly defined territories. On "Precarious Awakening," the distortions are abrasive and acidic, but it is a much more mysterious and haunting cloud of noise that temporarily erupts on the latter part of "The Ever-Changing Scene" and puts a very final touch to the album.
In between these two electric discharges are much more delicate, complex and ethereal pieces, first with Alexander Turnquist's complex sonic architectures on the epic "Fragments Vaulted Like Rebounding Hail" which, in the space of just over seventeen minutes, shatters acoustic instrumentation, interferences and processed electronics and found sounds into textured wallpapers which morph and change appearance throughout while remaining almost static. At first, Turnquist applies a finely detailed mechanical setting, but as layer upon layer of sound is added, and the reverb grows considerably, the piece becomes much more monolithic and rigid in appearance. Yet, there is a constant flow of activity just below the drone glaze of the surface which maintains the momentum throughout the piece. orchestramaxfieldparrish proposes the equally epic and dense "Waning Moon Over Sunless Sea" which shows a much more electric reading of quite similar ambiences. Yet, Mike Fazio creates here a wonderfully oneiric piece which takes shape very progressively into vast swathes of processed guitars. Unlike Turnquist, Fazio never drastically changes sonic setting here, and while strips of darker matter rise occasionally in the latter part of the track, the overall progression is almost imperceptible, yet it is very much real and tints the piece with rich undertones.
The three shorter middle tracks come courtesy of Seattle's Ryan Francesconi. His delicate acoustic pieces contrast greatly with the rest of the album. "Parables" is wonderfully light and airy. The feather-light melody is surprisingly complex and detailed, and actually seems to develop on a multitude of levels at once. This is also a characteristic of "Deep River Run Quiet," but the piece is more introspective and emotional. On "Green To Red," Francesconi teams up with Lili De La Mora, with whom he released the rather lovely Eleven Continents album earlier this year. Once again, the piece is somewhat reflective, but Lili's voice gives a much warmer and impressionist relief to Francesconi's delicate wanderings.
With its first release, textura has certainly created an impressive collection which reaches far beyond the realm of usual compilations to actually create a true narrative throughout. While the musicians featured come from somewhat diverse horizons, they meet here on common grounds and, while retaining their own identity, manage to contribute to the overall mood. Only 500 copies of Kubla Khan have been made available, and it would be a shame to miss it!
4/5"
Cyclic Defrost (Innerversitysound), issue 20, September 4, 2008:
"Ears aware of the quiet precision of sound in a blatantly loud world may have passed their eyes across the reviews in textura. Akin to Cyclic Defrost, discrete sonic adventurers abound in this Canadian music online magazine.
textura's first CD release is, in a sense, a contemplation on Coleridge's Kubla Khan (or A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment)—a poetic vision on history, all too resounding in modern times where the promises of “the pleasure dome” lulls to sleep its entrants. The representatives here are no slouches: The Retail Sectors (Kentaro Togawa) bookends the compilation with a build to drone and distorts intensity and warmth; Alexander Turnquist's “Fragments Vaulted Like Rebounding Hail” is an epic textural melding of his skill with 12-string guitar and toy xylophone fused with samplers and electronic manipulation; Ryan Francesconi's three tracks stand out and somehow their direct crisp guitar play conveys more; his simple bright, deceptively naïve, minimal guitarscapes reveal a depth of knowledge, and his “Green to Red” with Lili De La Mora vocals holds a delightful whimsy at the center of the compilation; Mike Fazio under the guise of orchestramaxfieldparrish presents a pedal steel guitar shimmer of light akin to ambient cathedral works of overly sacred organists.
It takes skill and active imagination to stay awake in Kubla Khan's dream. The players are aware of it being a dream and the entrants asleep, aware of their complicity in the dream state, and their close examination of technique, awareness, and mind activity allows the listener to enter and exit this beatific dream palace. With clarity of mind Textura's debut awakens the mind to the beauty beyond the soporific poetry of Coleridge."
For more information, please contact editor [at] textura.org
