Ashley, Greg / Requiem Mass And Other Experiments

Birdman

Requiem Mass and Other Experiments, the new album from Gris Gris founder and Creamery Studio owner Greg Ashley, opens with the side-long track "Requiem Mass"; the flip is a series of sound and music experiments. Ashley himself was kind enough to explain his methods of recording an experimental piece like this: "I begin 'Symmetric Juggling' with two competing tones panned away from one another between the two speakers. Then, a set of tribal-sounding drums fade up from the hum. Each individual drum was tracked / recorded separately, so they could be panned away from each other. During the song, the drums are constantly flipping back and forth through the speakers. This diverges into the symmetric part of the track in which all the music has been performed forward and backward identically over itself. You can hear the bass and drums suck into themselves in this fucked-up pulse. The end of this song is the beginning and the beginning is the end, and the center point explodes with a gong. 'Loop' is a mixing-board performance. It is a tape loop with eight tracks of different instruments and noises on it. Moving the faders up and down on the board and using the pans creates the music, if you want to call it that--more like a wall of shit--then I cut the tape to end it. "'Megalith' was written by Brad Dunn of Seattle, WA, who was partially the inspiration for this record. He performed it solo on a guitar in my apartment in 2006. I kept the tape for the last three years, recently transferred it to 16-track over the summer, and I added accompaniment to it. 'Monolith' is all about the reoccurring intro theme; each time it returns with a new harmony over it. 'Chinese New Year' is a mess of instruments stumbling around a cheerful pentatonic scale."

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