I’ve never been to Austin, Texas, but something about the music produced there tells me that it must be either an incredibly beautiful area, or there’s just something very inspiring in the water. Like fellow Austinites Explosions in the Sky, our subjects Balmorhea produce chilling instrumental music to captivate the mind and charm the soul. But unlike the expansive guitar-driven post-rock of their better-known contemporaries, Balmorhea assemble more delicate, but no less affecting scores to the panoramas of Texas.

Balmorhea are the epitome of prolific. Formed only a few short years ago in 2006, they have released a record every year since their inception (bar the first, understandably). If the quality of their fourth full-length offering, ‘Constellations’, is to be taken as benchmark of quality for the rest of their work, then this is no mean feat.

I knew from the opening bars of To the Order of the Night that I was in for a treat. The piano melody raised those little hairs on the back of my neck: more than a response to the chilly February weather outside I can assure you. That a group of people playing their instruments in a studio four thousand miles away can make me feel so completely in the room with them displays poise and talent in equal measure.

What marks this record as special is the notes that they don’t play, just as much as the ones that they do. There is a clear feeling of the deliberate placement of each chord, of each new layer and section. It manages this caution, however, without ever losing its ability to move.

It’s hard to pick a favourite track, because each one has something special; that tingle-inducing quality. The joyous banjo part and simple yet perfectly-placed drums in Bowspit; the almost vocal quality of the guitar in Night Squall. Steerage and the Lamp feels like the album’s centrepiece, but that’s more due to its length and position within the flow of the album than any hierarcy of quality.

The album closes on the simply devine Palestrina. That sense of calculated consideration is never more evident than here. A haunting drone builds through violin strings and sober choral vocals to a series of flawlessley appointed chords, and leaves you with an elegant feeling of calm and well-being.

- Review by Chris Grenville for Fluid Radio

www.balmorheamusic.com
www.westernvinyl.com

Album Of The Week: Keith Kenniff follows up 2008’s “The Malady of Elegance” with the third album under his Goldmund guise. Where Helios, his other key musical alias, takes on long form compositions which blend piano, guitar and electronics, Goldmund has always been about compact, concise piano music. On “Famous Places,” released this August on Western Vinyl, this is no different and may yet prove to be the best Goldmund album to date.

With fifteen beautifully crafted tracks, each around three minutes in duration, the deliberate capturing of piano pedals and hammers and captivating melodies all on display, the classic Goldmund sound is in full effect. Thankfully however Keith hasn’t opted for just more of the same. Instead he has introduced subtle uses of electronic manipulation and light doses of other ambient sounds which, while only minimal in use, add a rich layer of texture to his music.

Be it the mysterious echoes on album opener “Bergen” or the minute synth touches on “Alberta,” these inclusions bring new depth to Goldmund’s music. On “Brown Creek,” the most Helios-esque recording on the album, one anticipates a drum beat to arrive but keeping this album strictly Goldmund, Keith ensures the piano maintains the focus, while a slow, absorbing ambience allows the track to flow in a dream like manner. These new introductions are welcome additions whilst not deterring from the simplicity that makes this music so appealing to begin with.

Inspired by different landmarks in his life, each track seems to capture a small narrative. Some songs are melancholic, others evoke a blossoming romance or feelings of companionship and despite their pocket size form, such is the detail of the compositions and the craft of each melody that the emotional qualities are just as strong here as music of a greater duration.

If one considers this music in a literary sense, “Famous Places” is very much like a novella. Its short tracks are like digestible vignettes which can be absorbed easily in a single sitting. This is an album that will no doubt be enjoyed at different times and in a multitude of settings. In short, Keith has succeeded in not only relaying his “Famous Places” to his listeners, but has also created an album to allow his audience to add this as a soundtrack to their own memorable locations. – Review by Josh Atkin for Fluid Radio

www.myspace.com/goldmundmusic
www.westernvinyl.com

Being a self confessed admirer of Joshua’s work I just had to let you guys know about the latest Daytrotter Session ‘Living Off The Unwinding Days’…

Download the session free here

Joshua Tillman sings about holy visions and a barren spirit on “Age of Man,” a song from his latest album, “Year In The Kingdom,” his sixth effort. These holy visions are thorny and sometimes depressing, likely what are leading to these dried up, barren spirits that are briefly discussed. Tillman has discovered his own biomedical engineering to enable his throat to contain both the frozen ice of a stony gaze and a hearth when he sings directly to us in his piercing and touching manner. He gives us holy visions by way of their tripping vines and gray clouds, overcastting and problematic as if the visions are just enough askew to make one wonder how any of it’s going to work out this time.

There is thievery around the corners, takers and leavers and a reason for pessimism if the dawns weren’t so refreshing, if the fresh fruit in the bowls, on the tables in the “kingdom” weren’t so appetizing and mouth-watering to behold. Tillman embraces the ebbs and flows of daily life with his careful and breakable, charming and luring voice, giving us both sides of the razor as he does it – lifting us from the stagnancy of where we often can find ourselves and placing us just out of the reach of the gator’s snapping jaws, or in this case, somewhere between heaven and hell, alive and dead, or holiness and a godless, barren spirit. He tend to feel as if we know where he’d like to put us, where he’d like to exist himself, with those holy visions being projected large and in high definition across everything visible, but this is not altogether plausible.

“Year In The Kingdom,” seems like a tease of an idea – not the music or the songwriting, mind you, just the idea – an exercise in contemplation that has Tillman’s figures and characters imagining what will all come of everything, of them and how the eternal darkness is supposed to (they say) develop like a photographic image into this kingdom up there, down there or over there somewhere. The title track of the record leads it off and it’s the second shortest cut on it. He sings, “I spent a year in the kingdom, on my way through the garden,” and there’s a sense that it’s all in passing, as if even a stay in the kingdom – if this is in reference to some kind of idyllic afterlife is obviously entirely debatable as well, but we go with it – is temporary, with the journey still ahead. Maybe it too will get old and become somewhat draining.

The final song on the album, “Light of the Living,” gives a feeling of angelic wings, as if someone’s graduated as a guardian and is being placed back on the ground for watchfulness and those sorts of responsibilities. Like all of Tillman’s writing, “Year In The Kingdom,” is rich with allusions and stunning melody, hints to the kinds of thoughts that come to men and women who believe in the vastness of everything, who lean toward the thought that all is not just as it seems and that there is a depth to everything that never comes close to being plumbed.

We have no idea what we’re doing here or what’s to happen to us tomorrow, when we get old or when we die. It’s enough to make one sick with madness, but Tillman lets it calmly settle him and he gives to us his extrapolations in the form of songs cut from pure snows as well and from the pretty, but sad bouquets of flowers lovingly places upon tombstones years and years after a death, by someone who chooses to continue remembering, loving and thinking, “We’ll find each other where we promised/The tide is low for man and spirits,” or as Tillman sings on “Howling Light,” “Deafening in the wait/As your waking days unwind/Now the living are alive.”

Words by Sean Moeller
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry

Purchase Year In The Kingdom here

www.daytrotter.com
www.westernvinyl.com/artists/j-till.

The good folks over at Daytrotter recently invited Balmorhea to record live sessions that are all available as free downloads…

You can look anywhere and everywhere in the Balmorhea biography and the same goes for any band member contribution/instrumentation listings. You are not going to find a mention of any of the five members claiming their roles in the vocal department. It’s as if the brief interludes that we hear in their songs, where the spell of sole instrumental playing is broken, are highly suspect, as in the possibility that they are the works of other forces stepping invisibly up to the running microphones in the room and giving their harmonies or condolences in the case of these often sad and lonely songs. – Daytrotter

Full info on the sessions and download links from the Daytrotter web site site here

Also the new Balmorhea album ‘Constellations’ is out today and you can read a recent Fluid Radio review plus grab a free track here

Balmorhea’s latest project ‘Constellations’ sketches together a magnificent collection of acoustic/stringed compositions and slots into this weeks favored album with graceful ease.

Review from Chris Grenville…

I’ve never been to Austin, Texas, but something about the music produced there tells me that it must be either an incredibly beautiful area, or there’s just something very inspiring in the water. Like fellow Austinites Explosions in the Sky, our subjects Balmorhea produce chilling instrumental music to captivate the mind and charm the soul. But unlike the expansive guitar-driven post-rock of their better-known contemporaries, Balmorhea assemble more delicate, but no less affecting scores to the panoramas of Texas.

Balmorhea are the epitome of prolific. Formed only a few short years ago in 2006, they have released a record every year since their inception (bar the first, understandably). If the quality of their fourth full-length offering, ‘Constellations’, is to be taken as benchmark of quality for the rest of their work, then this is no mean feat.

I knew from the opening bars of To the Order of the Night that I was in for a treat. The piano melody raised those little hairs on the back of my neck: more than a response to the chilly February weather outside I can assure you. That a group of people playing their instruments in a studio four thousand miles away can make me feel so completely in the room with them displays poise and talent in equal measure.

What marks this record as special is the notes that they don’t play, just as much as the ones that they do. There is a clear feeling of the deliberate placement of each chord, of each new layer and section. It manages this caution, however, without ever losing its ability to move.

It’s hard to pick a favourite track, because each one has something special; that tingle-inducing quality. The joyous banjo part and simple yet perfectly-placed drums in Bowspit; the almost vocal quality of the guitar in Night Squall. Steerage and the Lamp feels like the album’s centrepiece, but that’s more due to its length and position within the flow of the album than any hierarcy of quality.

The album closes on the simply devine Palestrina. That sense of calculated consideration is never more evident than here. A haunting drone builds through violin strings and sober choral vocals to a series of flawlessley appointed chords, and leaves you with an elegant feeling of calm and well-being. – Chris Grenville

……………………………………………………………………………………………………..

About The Album:

Rob Lowe and Michael Muller, the songwriters and core duo of Austin’s Balmorhea (pronounced “bal-more-ay”), will release their newest full-length, Constellations, on the Western Vinyl label Februarly 23, 2010. Closely following the release of the group’s critically-acclaimed prior albums – All is Wild, All is Silent (2009) and Rivers Arms (2008) – Constellations further showcases the band’s songwriting and attention to detail, establishing Balmorhea as a major force in contemporary American independent music.

Balmorhea’s previous album All is Wild, All is Silent explored the freedom and isolation of settlers learning to live on an untamed frontier. It was an intensely physical album, dealing with the struggles of man on earth. By contrast, their new album, Constellations, shifts our focus to the cosmos and beyond, meditating solemnly on the mystical and metaphysical.

Steerage And The Lamp

The disarming simplicity of the tracks on Constellations proves that Balmorhea doesn’t need dense arrangements full of 180 degree turns to craft deeply affecting compositions. More than just self-imposed limitation, the scale of this collection of songs introduces a sense of intimacy and perspective through their skillful use of space and restraint.

For centuries humans have distilled order from the chaos of the night sky, turning a collection of bright dots into the framework for giants of myth and legend. Similarly, the tracks on Constellations serve as framework for our individual meditations on the wonders of time and space.

As the album captivates and inspires our imaginations by recreating the movements and colors of life, it often gives the listener the sense of being tossed about on the ocean, at the mercy of a reckless and merciless god. Ultimately we’re left with the euphoric release experienced as one realizes, for the first time, that his fate relies more upon the teasing whims of the unknown than any design of his own.

Track List:

01. To The Order Of Night
02. Bowsprit
03. Winter Circle
04. Herons
05. Constellations
06. Steerage And The Lamp
07. Night Squall
08. On The Weight Of Night
09. Palestrina

The beauty of Balmorhea’s sound has been a constant on Fluid Radio since we started out and it gives me great pleasure to announce a fantastic selection of experimental soundscapes compiled by band member Michael Muller…

The new Slow Six release ‘Tomorrow Becomes You’ on Western Vinyl has been gently growing on me of late and and is well worth checking for those of you who like your experimental guitar/stringed arrangements…

At the turn of the millennium in downtown New York, in an era of Moby and the Strokes, Slow Six was pulling up in front of clubs, loading in music stands, video projectors, a battery of string players, and a desktop computer (!) programmed with custom software. Reading down their twenty-minute electro-acoustic scores to stunned audiences, Slow Six helped redefine what was possible when those who grew up with both classical and rock music re-imagined their surrounding musical landscape in their own image.

Today, so-called “cross-over” music is near ubiquitous, from The Wordless Music Series to bands like The Books and composers like Nico Muhly. Yet it is now, following their 2007 sophomore release for the prestigious classical label New Albion, that Slow Six returns to their experimental rock roots with Tomorrow Becomes You, an emotionally unrestrained full-length infused with taught rhythms, unraveling melodies, and detailed ambiences that owe as much to Tortoise and The Dirty Three as Steve Reich and Brian Eno.

In keeping with the Slow Six mantra, this is still music that changes – and changes us – slowly over time – the virtuosic, minimalist hocketing in “The Night You Left New York” slowly giving way to its eruptive guitar-soaked finale. But a new, welcomed optimism runs through “Tomorrow Becomes You” – never has the band’s light shown so brightly as in the record’s finale, “These Rivers Between Us”.

Tignor’s signature software creations (free from the band’s site), which he uses to transform live sound, also make key appearances, creating unique electronic landscapes from talk radio on “Because Together We Resonate” and the players’ own performances on “Sympathetic Response System (part 2)”.

Track List:

1. The Night You Left New York
2. Cloud Cover (part 1)
3. Cloud Cover (part 2)
4. Because Together We Resonate
5. Sympathetic Response System (part 1)
6. Sympathetic Response System (part 2)
7. These Rivers Between Us listen

“Listening is like slipping into a warm aural bath…Tignor’s beguiling compositions move seamlessly through several stages of development, often ending up somewhere distant from where they appeared to be headed at the outset.” – Wire

Purchase here

www.westernvinyl.com
www.slowsix.com
www.myspace.com/slowsix

Balmorhea Exclusive by Fluid Radio on Mixcloud

The beauty of Balmorhea’s sound has been a constant on Fluid Radio since we started out and it gives me great pleasure to announce a fantastic selection of experimental soundscapes compiled by band member Michael Muller…

Track List:

Hauschka : Flingern 
A Broken Consort : A momentary sun
Peter Broderick : Violin and mouth
Grouper : Vessel
Goldmund : Threnody (live at the triple door)
Bexar Bexar : A little more south
Nils Frahm + Anne Müller : Reminds to teeth
Helios : Isoline
Infinite Body : Gardens grew backwards
Machinefabriek : Ijspret 1
Magnolia Electric Co. : The old horizon
Rameses iii : No water, no moon
Tiny Vipers : Dreamer
J. Tillman : Age of man

Also the new album from the band is just round the corner and comes highly recommended…

Balmorhea’s previous album All is Wild, All is Silent explored the freedom and isolation of settlers learning to live on an untamed frontier. It was an intensely physical album, dealing with the struggles of man on earth. By contrast, their new album Constellations shifts our focus to the cosmos and beyond, meditating solemnly on the mystical and metaphysical.

The disarming simplicity of the tracks on Constellations proves that Balmorhea doesn’t need dense arrangements full of 180 degree turns to craft deeply affecting compositions. More than just self-imposed limitation, the scale of this collection of songs introduces a sense of intimacy and perspective through their skillful use of space and restraint.

For centuries humans have distilled order from the chaos of the night sky, turning a collection of bright dots into the framework for giants of myth and legend. Similarly, the tracks on Constellations serve as framework for our individual mediations on the wonders of time and space.

As the album captivates and inspires our imaginations by recreating the movements and colors of life, it often gives the listener the sense of being tossed about on the ocean, at the mercy of a reckless and merciless god. Ultimately we’re left with the euphoric release experienced as one realizes, for the first time, that his fate relies more upon the teasing whims of the unknown than any design of his own.

Balmorhea
“Bowsprit” (mp3)
from “Constellations”
(Western Vinyl)

www.balmorheamusic.com

If you haven’t already discovered this label it’s about time you did!

Founded in 1998 in Austin, TX, Western Vinyl has been releasing adventurous and original music that manages to be both emotionally and intellectually engaging for over 10 years.

During those 10 years we’ve released music by some of our favorite artists including Bonnie Prince Billy, Goldmund, Oren Ambarchi, Robert Lippok, The Tren Brothers, Papa M, and more as part of the Portrait Series, and helped develop the careers of innovative artists including Dirty Projectors, Bexar Bexar, Balmorhea, Here We Go Magic, and more.

In 2009 we will release two albums by J. Tillman of Fleet Foxes, the third release by Austin’s own Balmorhea, the debut of Luke Temple’s new project Here We Go Magic, Glass Ghost’s debut, Ola Podrida’s sophmore release, Sleep Whale’s debut full-lenth, and several other exciting new albums.

www.westernvinyl.com

Western Vinyl says:

We’re thrilled to be releasing J. Tillman’s Year In the Kingdom this fall!  The CD release will be followed soon by a vinyl version and a 7″ single.  Both CD and vinyl versions include artwork by the amazing Mario Hugo.

In support of these releases, Tillman will tour the US and EU with Pearly Gate Music.  Detailed date and venue info is available here.  As if this weren’t enough, next month fans can expect to see the premiere of a video for the new album directed by Sean Pecknold.

The J. Tillman Daytrotter session is up!!! Check it out here.

Revue:

The ill-informed may confuse J. Tillman’s solo material as a side project, but alas, Tillman was a solo artist long before he was the drummer for it-band Fleet Foxes. Tillman’s hypnotic, deep lull of a voice is quite different when contrasted with the sweeping pastoral harmonies of his other band. Throwing his name in the hat of uber-prolific singer/songwriters, Tillman returns with his second album in a year entitled Year In The Kingdom. Whereas most of Tillman’s previous material owed much of its charm to a decidedly self-produced sound, Year In The Kingdom sounds as immaculate as anything he’s done. As we all know, too much polish can be a detriment. Sometimes music resonates in its imperfection rather than its lack thereof. In the case of Year In The Kingdom, the improvement in fidelity is less of a hindrance and more of a welcome evolution. Tillman’s voice is crystal clear, and while the instrumentation sounds as crisp as ever, the arrangements on Year In The Kingdom still exhibit the same stripped-down aesthetic Tillman fans have come to love. That’s not to say Tillman hasn’t expanded his soundscape a bit. You’ll notice some unfamiliar sounds on Year In The Kingdom. For example, the gorgeous hammered dulcimer on “Crosswinds” and “Howling Light” adds a dramatic element. It’s ironic that through his involvement with Fleet Foxes, Tillman has only now started to cultivate a well-deserved following. If you take into account all his solo material, Tillman’s no less than a veteran songwriter at this point. If Year In The Kingdom isn’t the best album he’s released, it sure as hell is in the running. — Capt. Obvious

www.westernvinyl.com

www.jtillmanmusic.com