This CD may be purchased through Kendra Steiner Editions while copies remain. (
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Early last year, after we’d discussed a research trip I made to the polar ice cap, Bill Shute asked me about a potential release for Kendra Steiner Editions. It would be focused upon and derived from “water”. The process of recording for and completing this album took quite a bit of time, much of it used for deliberating and narrowing down from the myriad approaches that could be taken. While these recordings will undoubtedly be listened to using normal speakers in air, much of the sounds were captured through and within a completely different medium, wherein sound behaves and propagates much differently. The sounds of an industrial coastal pile driver, heard in 32°42’N 117°14’W, were recorded simultaneously in air and in water, with sound traveling at different speeds within the two mediums. For each piece I thought similarly about the properties and behaviors of the environments from which the material was captured, and equal consideration was given to the locations. Some locales are featured unedited; “32°59’N 96°50’W” situates the listener within a suburban pond, below a creaky wooden bridge, the wind on surface areas above the water line heard below in natural howls. “Bellerive” is an improvisation with the musicality of a pool’s jets, pumps, filters, and associated water flow, recorded with suspended stereo hydrophones. Listening to 4.3:1 as a sequenced album, there is the intent of musical accompaniment to the natural environment itself, a process of interacting with and responding musically — and, at a most basic level, tonally — to field recordings in situ or in post, as a matter of communing with the temporal. - Alan F Jones, San Diego, CA, February 2017
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From Kendra Steiner Editions:
Very excited to welcome San Diego-based composer A.F. Jones to the KSE family. I’ve been an admirer of his work for a few years and made his acquaintance when he did the mastering for Derek Rogers’ phenomenal KSE album Depth/Detail Of Processing (KSE #292, from 2015, out of print). I know Derek’s work well, having released a number of albums by him and having worked with him doing poetry-and-electronics things both in person and on recording and having seen him live a number of times. However, NO ONE has ever captured the fine, pointillistic detail of Derek Rogers’ work the way Alan Jones did with his mastering of that album. Alan’s Laminal Audio has done mastering for many other artists in the experimental music world (and for KSE’s Steve Flato album), and everyone says the same thing, “A.F. Jones has amazing ears and amazing technical ability.” And that’s just his mastering….now, about his music….
As a composer, A. F. JONES is really in a class of his own. As he has been called an “undersea acoustician” (by Tiny Mix Tapes), I was excited by the thought of him taking KSE listeners on a trip deep into that little-known world that covers 71% of the Earth’s surface and suggested he create a piece that grew out of his underwater field recordings and nautical background." - Bill Shute