Ex-Easter Island Head - Two Comissions For Cassette Tape FLAC

Tracklist

Versions

Credits

• Design – Lewis Mclean
• Mastered By – Martin Kuchta
• Mixed By – James Rand

Notes

‘A Curfew Tower for Bill Morrison’ was commissioned by Static Gallery, Liverpool and was written and recorded across five days in The Curfew Tower, Cushendall; an 18th century tower functioning as an artists' residency in Antrim, Northern Ireland. Using a pair of microphones, two prepared guitars, cassette four track, percussion and the resonant properties of the stone walls, wooden floors and narrow passageways within the four-story structure’s architecture, the piece sees the duo of Benjamin D. Duvall and Patrick Morrison reflecting on the life of playwright, director, actor and mentor Bill Morrison (1940-2011). Part celebration, mourning and wake, the piece sees Bill's typewriter returned to Antrim the county of his birth and resting place of his ashes – and incorporated into a deeply personal ritual of sound and remembrance.

‘Mercy Commission’ was an evening length installation piece for three cassette tape loops and multiple speakers, commissioned by Mercy Arts/Literature agency as part of the Spectres of Spectacle event held at Static Gallery, Liverpool, 29 September 2011. The brief was to create “Half-erased, deliberately fogged works across lo-fi, spoken word, and the analogue/digital crossover”. The three loops each represent a fragment of a personal history: a lost mangled loop of voice and synthesiser unearthed, a prepared bass guitar inherited from a friend no longer with us, a hundred year-old harmonium threads of narrative cycling permanently in slow phase, combining and separating to produce a meaning just out of reach. The piece ran continuously for six hours with no processing, save for volume adjustments performed from a simple timeline based score and the changing timbral and dynamic effects caused by the movement of people through the gallery. Presented on this release in a significantly condensed form foregrounding the melodic, tonal qualities of the piece over its durational ones, Mercy Commission is Ex-Easter Island Head's first 'performerless' piece, with the mechanical certainty of the endlessly repeating loops taking the group's use of repetitive processes to their logical extreme.

Companies

• Mastered At – Roughgrain