A charity compilation album. All profits will go to Fr. McGrath Community Centre, Kilkenny, Ireland. Thank you to everyone who bought this and, especially to all the artistic contributors who appear on the compilation.
Some notes from the composers:
"Quebrada" by Luis Fernando Amaya
"When I was living in Puerto Rico, I stayed at a house next to a "quebrada:" a brook that runs between two small mountains just outside of San Juan. The topography around this quebrada [in italics] has protected the trees from being cleared for construction which, naturally, has also protected the fauna that inhabits it. I have fallen in love with the variety of sounds that come from it at different times of the day. The word quebrada [in italics] also means “broken.” Indeed, the brook and the ecosystem around it have been broken up by houses, warehouses, and highways built around it. Every day, the sounds produced by the fauna in the quebrada [in italics] mix with those of the dominating animal of this region: the human. At dusk, thousands of coquís (tiny frogs, native to Puerto Rico) begin to create a sort of wall of sound that is present throughout the night, built together with the sounds of insects and nocturnal birds. This wall of sound is every so often penetrated by fireworks or a reggaetón booming from a car passing by the highway nearby. At dawn, the sounds of several species of wild birds—pitirres, guaraguaos, comeñame, reinitas moras [all in italics]—mix with what sounds like a war cry from dozens of roosters. Later in the day, the rumor of cars, trucks, and airplanes begins to creep in as the songs of non-human animals become more sparse and quiet. Quebrada [in italics] is a sonic exploration not only of the quebrada itself but of the relationship I’m building with it. It presents field recordings of this ecosystem at different times of the day and night mixed with sounds made with objects found in it. Some of the field recordings have been digitally manipulated."
"Return to the Castle (excerpts)" by Conal Ryan
"Trace around the horse in Giorgio de Chirico’s ‘Return to the Castle’ by counting its pointy edges. Bring other qualities: autobiography, horsiness, etc. Three cycles or more."
"Taite's Fancy" by Neil Quigley:
"I wrote this track as part of a larger work about wands and divination which became far too daunting of a project, so I ended up picking the bones of it for other projects.
This piece was written after reading about Edwin Rist's bird specimen heist in the book Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing and watching the same guy's "HeavyMetalFlute" covers of the Game of Thrones theme tune and Metallica's Master of Puppets on YouTube.
The track started as an imagined soundtrack to a scene of Victorian angling, but then became an exercise in assembling a jumble of cultural and historical artifacts into a relatively cohesive mediation on the history of post-industrial revolution conceptions of nature."
"From The Town of the Dark Stranger to the Hill of the Eight" by Eoin Callery
"While recording the output of a Max patch through Blackhole and on into Logic, I noticed that some channels where distorting for no apparent reason. It wasn’t a sample rate issue, foldback, buffer issue, CPU overload, etc., and on some days it affected one channel and the next day it would affect a different channel. Strangely the distortion was not audible while monitoring the output of Logic live. I’m sure the cause is something very simple, which is staring me in the face, but for now, I’ve run out of time to figure it out! In any event, it sounds good and if it is never to be repeated so be it. And so, what you hear in this piece is a stereo track consisting of fragments of early music pieces reverberated by convolving them with impulse responses created from those same early music pieces — a process called auto-reverberation (https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=21503) — which become, by accident, heavily distorted when recorded into Logic from Max. This stereo track is then reverberated one last time through one of my favourite impulses created during the auto-reverberation process. The title of the piece is also a distortion — a play on the literal English translations of two places I have lived in Ireland — something that both adds to and obscures the original."
Cover/Poster design by Neil P. Quigley. The print is an interpreted collection of object from each contributor on the album. It is based on bookcase wallpaper found in a shoddy Cork Airbnb and Korean Chaekgeori paintings.
