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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
This is an audiophile 180gram pressing on midnight ultra-black vinyl from Optimal (Germany) that comes in a 24pt jacket with printed on textured uncoated 100% recycled Orford paperboard with a polylined black paper dust sleeve and 12"x24" art poster.
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This music was performed wearing a customized heart monitor providing a single pulse to trigger analogue drums, sine wave patterns, controlled feedback, and synthesizers in real time. All electronic rhythmic material stems from this source.
This is my second album on Constellation and this is what they wrote about it:
Jason Sharp has emerged as one of Canada's most fascinating New Music composers in recent years. From his roots as a saxophonist in Montréal's fertile jazz and improv scene, Sharp developed as a soloist with drone-based durational music, circular breathing, and an increasing exploration of the body and technology.
His impressive 2016 debut A Boat Upon Its Blood was a molten and musically diverse work of modern composition inspired by a Robert Creeley poem, distinguished by Sharp’s use of a heart monitor and amplified breath to trigger various rhythmic and textural electronic elements – alongside his own saxophone playing and contributions from guest players on violin and lap steel guitar.
Stand Above The Streams expands on this approach, with Sharp having further developed his custom Midi and synthesis apparatuses, and most notably collaborating on these compositions with Adam Basanta, whose renowned practice in sound art, sound installation and autonomous sound systems makes for impressively immersive, layered and complex new work.
All sound sources on Stand Above The Streams originate with Sharp (with the exception of violin from the album’s co-producer and mixing engineer Jesse Zubot on one song): bass and baritone saxophones, heartbeat, pulse, and breathing are played/processed in real time through Sharp's own signal-bending synthesis rig and through Basanta’s bespoke 'controlled feedback' amplification system. The album's rhythms are generated wholly from Sharp's similarly controlled breathing and heart rate. The results are utterly gripping, with melodic and micro-tonal elements flowing amidst waves of atmospheric pink and brown noise, low-end modulation and calibrated distortion.
Through four parts each running in the 10-minute range, Stand Above The Streams conjures an evocative, abstracted survey of organic nature, perhaps from on high, like a satellite scanning and processing data across diverse and slowly changing landscapes. The album also sits very comfortably alongside the recent resurgence in synth-based soundtrack music (John Carpenter, Tangerine Dream et al) – though as alien as it can sometimes sound, there is an unmistakable human element and underlying warmth that courses through the tensile strength of this music, electrifying it with the viscera of the body.
credits
released February 23, 2018
Jason Sharp: Amplified heart, feedback, synthesizers, bass and baritone saxophones
Adam Basanta: Controlled feedback and amplification systems
Jesse Zubot: Violin (Tracks 3+4)
Recorded by Radwan Ghazi Moumneh at Hotel2Tango in Montreal
Mixed by Radwan Ghazi Moumneh and Jesse Zubot
Co-produced by Jason Sharp and Jesse Zubot
Mastered by Harris Newman at Greymarket Mastering
supported by 15 fans who also own “Stand Above The Streams”
Haunting, contemplative, and sonorous, there is a langour to the layers of violin that is both calming and other-worldly, although sometimes full of foreboding. A very thoughtful and deeply hypnotic experience. Spaceman Si
supported by 12 fans who also own “Stand Above The Streams”
First half is difficult and beautiful; second half is mournful and ethereal. There are deep movements within. Jessica Moss is an amazing artist. aconitum vulparia
Composer Aleksandra Słyż explores the physicality of stringed and wind instruments on this vibrant LP, her first for Warm Winters Ltd. Bandcamp New & Notable Sep 27, 2022
The debut from Vermont duo UNIONBLOCK features homemade electromagnetic banjos creating haunting drones in religious space. Bandcamp New & Notable May 24, 2022
