Celer - Fountain Glider (Students of Decay, 2009)

1 Runway Wind / Leftover Thunderhead / Drift-off / Radio Haze / Shattered Beauty / Collide-oscope / Contacting Mirrors / Splendor Floor / A Footrest At 8,000 Feet / Visible Eyehole / Open Springs At First / In Time, Even / Wah / A Train Of Chemtrails / Global Dimming / Lapping Circulations / Sailplane / Love-lift / Spinning Séance / Manmade Wings / Carry Those Chords In Your Stomach / Compensatory Listening 48:28

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Celer - Poulaine (Students of Decay, 2009)

1 Misinterpreted Renaissance / Ploughs Of The Double-Sided / Floating Cells / Do Me That Love / Empty Buckets Over The Sky / Wonder If It Was Really Worth It To Wonder / Fleshy Trumpets / Fifth With White / Fourth With Red / Naked As Art / The Burden Of Mind / Reachlessness / So Much They Cannot Know 44:05

Created by commission for the University of California at Irvine as a sound companion for an exhibition of 13 different 14th Century manuscripts. The original pieces existed as 13 different parts for each individual piece of art.

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Acre - Painless (Students of Decay, 2008)

1 Untitled 21:59
2 Untitled 18:18
3 Untitled 7:01
4 Untitled 12:49
5 Untitled 19:44

Acre is the solo endeavor of Portland's Aaron Davis, with prior releases on Yarnlazer and Black Horizons, and a full length LP due out soon on Arbor. "Painless" is a carefully composed, intensly FOCUSED study of HEAVY tone. Clocking in at 79 minutes, it is perhaps the most daunting and awe-inspiring Acre missive to date, with Davis casting looong, cascading drone spells which are as impossibly heavy as they are narcotically hypnotic. Don't miss this one.
Students of Decay

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Slow Listener - Enthusiastic Pursuit Of The Pointless (Students of Decay, 2007)

1 Appreciate All Around, Hits Me Deep 13:37
2 "Do You Know How I Know? It's Because I Think So" 15:57
3 Las Vegas Origami 8:00

Following up simply stellar releases on Celebrate Psi Phenomenon and Ruralfaune, Slow Listener returns with"Enthusiastic Pursuit of the Pointless." Campbell Kneale's descriptor 'slumberpunk' for the SL C/PSI/P release proves germane on this album as well, with Slow Listener spewing forth deep, velvety pools of fractured, yet soothing, analog sound. Great stuff to play late into the night or early in the morning while rubbing the sleep out of your weary eyes.
Foxy Digitalis

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Wire Thicket - Dust, Static (Students of Decay, 2006)

1 Dust, Static (16:03)
2 Brilliant Dead Highways: Revisited (5:37)

Drone méditatif pour le premier morceau, revisite d'un morceau de Taiga Remains pour le second...

In describing the debut Wire Thicket album, released on Pseudoarcana in 2006, Antony Milton applied to the duo the term "power-drone." On their second outing, the pair have fully embraced this label and taken it to new, delirious peaks. The title track is a fifteen minute blast of singing, celestial metal; an impassioned, deeply meditative flight into the starry night conjured from guitar, electronics and field recordings. Characteristic of the duo's prior work together, the piece is an excercise in accretion -- with layers and layers of meticulously detailed sound arranged into a furious, beautiful blanket of howling drone. Emerging from the tonal rubble is a second, shorter piece: a reworking of Taiga Remains' "Brilliant Dead Highways" (a piece featured previously on a split 7'' with CJA) - akin to a delicate, drifting calm at the end of an immense storn.
Students of Decay

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Taiga Remains - Paper Lanterns (Students of Decay, 2006)

1 Neone (9:58)
2 Vistas (8:24)

Drones à base de guitare acoustique traitée, de vocaux distants et d'électronique stylée...

One time I was in a fist-fight – long story, don’t ask – and I’d landed a couple, and taken a couple too, and then Time. Slowed. Down. Riiiiiiiiiiiight down, to the point where I was mentally focusing tight in on the swinging punches of my assailant at about 1.5 frames a second. And each breath I took was taking hours to draw and release, and the blood was deafening, banshee-howling as it sped around my body, hopped-up on adrenaline, spinning out on the corners and burning its tires in the cul-de-sac of my lungs. But then I started to hear little tiny melodies too drifting in and out of my mix; ghosting, skirting around on the fringes of my attention, as I was ducking and weaving and.. well.. this is the sound of "Paper Lanterns". Punching well above its weight, Alex Cobb's Taiga Remains project returns with more deep-listening psych-drone -
eighteen-and-something minutes of the exploded microverse of the sound of one breath. In. And out. But it's not some kind of yogic transcendental meditation, concentrating on one's inner being with one's legs wrapped around the back of one's ass; it's more along the lines of Popol Vuh being tortured in slow motion on some medieval device which has been contact-mic'd and run through a 20,000 watt PA. This is mainly due to the astonishingly loud mastering; astonishing chiefly in that it's Really. Fucking. Loud.Frankly, I've had jet aircraft land on my head, and hurt less than I hurt the first time through with this thing on the cans. But really I guess it's bigger than the both of us; it's not so much about the single slow, calm inhalation and exhalation of you, or I, or that guy over there - nor is it the rattling echo of life-blood coursing through our arteries and veins and capillaries and pounding in our cauliflower ears and battered noses. It's the thundering, roaring of the stream of the protons emanating from the origin of the universe in
its slow, deep, melancholic shuffle; expanding to fill all available space, and then collapsing in on itself again as it rounds final turn and into the home-stretch back towards the beginning of time. It's scored for acoustic guitar, voice and computer. It's the perfect intersection of drone and "harsh-noise." And it's really, really beautiful.
Foxy Digitalis

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Uton - Ground's Dream Cosmic Love (Students of Decay, 2006)

1 Ground's Dream Cosmic Love (Magmamagnetic Golden Turtle Mix) (45:44)

Longue piste de 45 minutes de drone minimal qui sonnerait comme le battement de la pluie sur les toits et le grondement d'un train tout à la fois...

Once again, Finland's Jani Hirvonen pilots his Uton vessel through majestic, organic vectors of ur-drone bliss. These subterranean landscapes both threaten and beguile, with oppressive hum and hiss giving way to distant lullaby melodies that sound like they're being transmitted live
and direct from some primitive metropolis whose inhabitants have never seen the sun.
Students of Decay

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Procer Veneficus - Deathwanderings (Students of Decay, 2005 (2008 reissue))

1 I (6:17)
2 II (6:11)
3 III (2:57)
4 IV (6:00)
5 V (6:13)
6 VI (3:45)
7 VII (4:08)
8 VIII (3:16)
9 IX (6:51)
10 X (2:56)
11 XI (3:08)

Réédition par Students of Decay d'un cd autoproduit en 2005 et augmenté de 3 morceaux. Procer Veneficus revisite les fugues de Schubert, Chopin et Satie pour les déconstruire et en tirer des morceaux glaciaux et soporifiques, pas très loin des oeuvres les plus récentes d'Andrew Chalk....

On "Deathwanderings," Procer Veneficus appropriates drifting fugues from Chopin, Satie and Schubert and distorts them into beautiful smears of wistful ambience. These are pieces that, Derek notes, have " been examined, assembled, and deconstructed into cavernous resonance. Originally intended for use as a soporific, this is music for worlds of ice constructed in the deepest recesses of the mind, and for wanderings at the threshold of death." Not a million miles off from recent Andrew Chalk recordings, and gorgeous as all hell.
Students of Decay

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Natural Snow Buildings - Sung to the North (Students of Decay, 2008)

1 At That Time, It Was Always Winter (10:30)
2 The First Conjuror (59:42)
3 Sung To The North (9:28)

On ne présente plus... Folk et drone... Tirage limité à 100 exemplaires couplé pour la sortie de The Snowbringer Cult...

Limited to 100 copies. This CDR was available exclusively with the purchase of "The Snowbringer Cult".

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Peter Wright - At Last a New Dawn (Students of Decay, 2007)

1-1 Urban Wolves (10:50)
1-2 Death Ships Approaching (9:24)
1-3 Glass Floor Vertigo (3:58)
1-4 The Big Fight (18:00)
1-5 The Whole Facade Will Come Crumbling Down (7:06)
2-1 Blue Light District (9:53)
2-2 Punishment Drugs (7:15)
2-3 At Last A New Dawn (34:06)
2-4 When It Was Calmer The Bleeding Stopped (3:46)

Sans doute le chef d'oeuvre de Peter Wright, drones de guitares fantomatiques et field recordings parfaitement à propos. Mort, douleur, perte mais aussi espoir et rédemption....

Since Peter Wright dropped his last record the field in which he operates, guitar-based drones augmented by field recordings, has become increasingly crowded. Few other contenders, though, are making records with this much class and emotional enormity.

Talking about specific tracks on an album like this seems a little redundant (most of the titles seem like afterthoughts anyway, hardly fitting descriptions of Wright's glistening and churning universes of sound).

The album opens quietly before escalating into seething undulation that treads nimbly along the chaos/beauty divide. This gives way to distant whistling and hollering. Midway through disc one there a merciful lull in the emotional overload as chiming fingerpicking rings out into space.
Disc two opens with a track containing samples of news reports of the London underground bombings, the track was composed by Wright on the morning of the bombings as police sirens made their way through the city. Where so much drone-based music seeks to evoke galaxies and clouds and strives for transcendence rather than be concerned with anything as earthbound as terrorism, Wright has created a beautiful and distinctly human moment of sadness.

What Wright injects into his music to separate it from the drone horde is difficult to define, but it seems to me that this record is permeated by the same kind of longing and indefinable sadness that defines the best work of artists like Richard Youngs and Alastair Galbraith. One of the year's monumental works.
Foxy Digitalis

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