Monday, January 18, 2010

Teenager - Smiling Faces/Beautiful Places

Just a small update here to announce one very special new thing: the Childhood's End Preservation Society, or CEPS. This "don't call-it-a-label" imprint now coexists alongside Milieu Music specifically for the purpose of releasing selected works from a gigantic archive of cassette-tape recordings, originating from 1983 to the present. Literally a few hundred tapes...recordings my father made when I was a child, band rehearsals, demos, weird experiments, field recordings, everything. Since I was 14 I obsessively taped everything and CEPS is an effort to preserve that material digitally, before the tapes themselves fall apart.

http://tapes.milieu-music.com/

So where is this massive archive of tapes, you ask? Well, for the moment, while it is still being digitized and cultivated, it is private. However there will be a "storefront" aspect to CEPS as well, which will offer selections from the archives in super-special limited edition packages, as time goes on. Eventually the archive will be a public deal, and I have not quite sorted out how to handle that yet, but for the time being, here is all you really need to know:

TEENAGER
SMILING FACES/BEAUTIFUL PLACES
CEPS1
Lathe-cut 8" EP
Limited edition of 40 copies

$11 POST PAID WORLDWIDE

The first CEPS release, from the session tapes for my Nine Billion Names album, is a super-limited affair pressed to a lathe hand-cut in New Zealand. Two acoustic songs, each with little codas, that literally and figuratively connect the Nine Billion Names album with my upcoming Summer's Parting Ways release at Attacknine. Payment and shipping of this item is handled by Plastic Log in New Zealand and does NOT go to me, so don't freak out when your money isn't going to the Milieu Music address. Due to the nature of the lathe-cut vinyl, there are really only 40 copies of this EP in existence so if you're keen on getting one, quickness is advised.

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Friday, January 8, 2010

Coppice Halifax - Ocean Lion (II)

Not to be confused with the first Ocean Lion album (MMD002), this is the second album of the Ocean Lion set. Tropically oceanic, sunny and psychedelic as ever, this album is probably one of the best things I think I've done under the Coppice Halifax name. Where the first Ocean Lion was full of muted, elongated tones, this one brings more melody to the forefront, while still filled to the brim with a curtain of dense atmospherics. Loads of bass and deep repetitive grooves, covered in field recordings of the beach. Limited to 50!

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As with the first Ocean Lion album, the second one also comes with an EP companion. Two tracks on the more ambient side of the Ocean Lion spectrum, one with twinkling drips of starlike notes over a longing pedalbass, and the other a disembodied still-life depicting a weary traveler, lost at sea. Limited to 50.

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Brian Grainger - Asleep In A Desert

Opening a new monthly series for 2010 is Asleep In The Desert. A huge, evolving drone improvisation that brings to mind some of the more melodic moments of Porous Variations. This series, aptly titled Workingman's Drone, will deliver an EP each month. Each EP will be a drone improvisation done on a specific instrument, and each month's source instrument will vary. For WD1, the piece was built using controlled feedback, but recorded in such a way that what you get is a warm, humming drone that is easy on the ears and easy on the mind.

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