Clay Pipe レコード& CD

Review: Cate Brooks is now up to a seventh release on Clay Pipes and with each new outing she always evolves. 'Easel Studies' is no different and sees the artist going further than ever before beyond the pale when it comes to sound synthesis and experimentation on the Buchla Music Easel. What results is melody that's both abstract and alien but still beautifully compelling. She layers it up in hypnotic fashion across ten tracks that range from the cosmic to the synthetic, the ambient to more rhythmic. It's the sort of record to put on loud and tune in to closely and lose all sense of space and time.

Review: "As a long-time fan of soundtracks and library music, I was thrilled by the opportunity to see just how much emotion I could compress into the brief connecting links that would augment a furtive kiss, a painful psychic vision, or a breeze across the bones of a scorched landscape," says Timmi Meskers, the North Country, New York-based artist behind Garden Gate. "The first glimmer of Magic Lantern flickered over the kitchen sink, if memory serves. I was cleaning up with a dear friend, author Roan Parrish, and we were discussing how we could collaborate creatively. "Our first idea was that she would share prose to inspire my themes, and inversely, I would share a few original themes to inspire her writing. Before we knew it, what started as a handful of stories and songs, damp with soap suds, ended up becoming a fully scored audiobook anthology." In practice, that sounds like achingly beautiful compositions packed with a sense of wonder and mystery, adventures and experiences waiting for a narrative, blissed out stargazing scores and spectacular ambient movements.