The Pleasance & The Purchase
2012 | Senufo Editions (IT) | Edition #27
7-inch black vinyl, numbered edition of 200 copies
Tracklist
A. The Pleasance {5:00}
B. The Purchase {5:00}
Credits
Composed and recorded by Noé Cuéllar & Joseph Kramer in Chicago in 2010.
Mastering : Giuseppe Ielasi
Artwork : Forest For the Trees and Foucault Pendulum by Holly Murkerson
Notes
The sound is sourced entirely from the dismembered and displaced performance of shruti box and tape loops. Its lineage can be traced back to the fixed media work for dance, Fourbound [2010], choreographed by Rachel Damon, and through its close relationship with the multichannel performance/installation work Copse [2010]. In fact, Side A shares its title, The Pleasance, with the first movement of Copse. This new record, like those works, is focused on the creation and designation of spaces. It is also concerned, like those works, with the bodies that exist within the sound field.
Where this recording departs from those previous pieces is that it presents a fixed perspective to a listener, and offers no choreography for present bodies. The listener is not able to negotiate a multisourced sound environment, but is instead repositioned as a point existing within a stereo projection that they share responsibility for creating (the listener turns the recording on, sets the volume, places the speakers, selects a point from which to listen, etc.). Fixed and flattened, the work becomes a private question of where an individual finds his or her footing within the space that they have had a hand in creating.
Press
An amazing duo using bellows and electronics. Safe to say I am now a completist. God knows we have all heard enough textbook electronic treatments of acoustic instruments (eg. violin and Max/MSP), but this is an entirely different beast. More narrative in structure than exploratory, with great attention to detail.
–Brian Beaudry, Cut and Run {2012}
Search for images of the lads who comprise Coppice and you will find that they look remarkably like slightly better-scrubbed direct descendants of the squeezebox player on the cover of Killing Capitalism With Kindness. Spin the 45, though, and a different picture emerges. They mine their squeezebox (shruti box, actually) for wheeze, whistle, and most of all clatter, not notes. The results are more like field recordings of debris being moved or surreptitious activities in a workshop than the blessedly begrimed tunes on that old Xpressway box. I suspect, though, that if this stuff were made in New Zealand in 1990 rather than Chicago in 2010, it would have stood an excellent chance of finding its way onto the box. If you need less obscure coordinates, Can made ethnographic forgeries – these guys craft fictional locations. Although Giuseppe Ielasi’s name appears nowhere on the record, it’s his label, and his attention to sonic detail is evidenced by sounds that seem to take shape in air after the stylus sucks them off the vinyl and passes them through the speakers. It comes in a lovely black and white sleeve in a numbered edition of 200.
–Bill Meyer, Still Single {2012}