This beautiful release features 37 short tracks of raw iridescent ambience (total time exceeding 78 minutes) reflecting the hyper-temporal nature of what are known as "nacreous clouds". And like the clouds, the tracks are quick to appear and disappear. Playback using the random shuffle mode of your CD player is highly recommended.

While this is undoubtedly an ambient release, it is unusual in that there are many short tracks instead of one or two long ones, and each of the tracks is notably "raw" in that they do not use additional processing like reverb to enhance the initial processed sound sources further. This might prove to be a challenge for those who prefer their ambience buried under a thousand pounds of reverb, but it is not the intent of the artists or and/OAR to release "just another ambient CD". Instead, we invite you to explore an alternative method of rendering ambience in a way that is more immediate, therefore effecting the listener's mind in a more personal and powerful way.

"We originally recorded ourselves playing instruments such as cello, violin, piano and bells. We also made recordings of household sounds (such as showers, running water in the sink, and television static), plus the wind outside, beaches cars passing, walking on gravel streets, etc. Afterward we went through everything, choosing specific parts in lengths ranging from 3 seconds to 3 minutes, and made tape loops of everything. At this point, we arranged the different tape loops into patterns and speeds meant to resemble the clouds and their actions as much as possible. When mixing the loops, we played three to six of them at a time, on different reel-to-reel tape players connected to both of our laptops and channeled back out into a Kaiser filter." (Celer) Celer are the wife and husband duo of Dani Baquet-Long and Will Long. After releasing a rather prolific series of handcrafted self-released CDRs, 2008 has seen a sudden flurry of CD releases on recording labels such as Spekk (with Matthieu Ruhlmann), two releases on Infraction (with a possible third to come?), plus and/OAR.

Later that fall, Kahn sent Asher several pre-dawn recordings he had made on the shores of Zürich Lake. Asher processed these in keeping with the methods he had used with his own location recordings so as to create continuity among the amassing material. Unprocessed wind recordings made by Kahn in the Swiss Alps in the summer of 2007 comprised the final batch of material used on Vista. Asher and Kahn spent the remainder of that year working on a final mix. Addressing the idea of hearing and seeing out and beyond spatial planes, the title Vista references both the aural expanses of Asher's home on a hill in the town of Somerville and Kahn's trips to the Alps and Zürich Lake.

In processing and mixing the discrete details of a landscape, we hear them from a real physical distance. Through the incidental combinations of processed local sounds and sound materials which are entirely foreign to us, an imaginative aural view is created which obscures any relationship to a documentary account of the original locations recorded for Vista.

Yui Onodera first attracted attention with work released on his own Critical Path label in 2005. It wasn't too long after, that he attracted the attention of Drone Records, and/OAR, Mystery Sea, Taalem and Gears Of Sand (releases still forthcoming on Mystery Sea and Gears Of Sand).

Suisei is a work composed from field recordings and pump organ. Edited and re-mastered by Dale Lloyd.

With Suisei, each listener's inner cinema will find its camera lens slowly panning and cross-fading from one enigmatic location to another, as if unveiling ambiguous visual clues pertaining to some wondrous culminating event that many might not fully understand, yet it will still manage to leave an indelible impression upon the subconscious mind and a very subtle pull on the emotions. A mystery drone soundscape journey along the shores of an unfathomable glistening sea...

Packaged in four color digipak. Very limited at 300 copies.

Hitoshi Kojo | mp3

John Hudak | mp3

This is the second of a series of label projects pertaining to film directors. The first one was for Andrei Tarkovsky, the third one is currently in progress and pertains to Michelangelo Antonioni's "Tetralogy" (L'Avventura/La Notte/L'Eclisse/Deserto Rosso).

This second release turns its focus upon Yasujiro Ozu's use of "pillow shots" (i.e. short poetic pauses that appear between the acting segments of his films. The term "pillow shot" was not coined by Ozu himself, but several years after his passing in the early 1960s by a Japanese journalist who was trying to draw a comparison of the intermediate scenes to "pillow words" found in traditional Japanese poetry. This is a double CD release with both CDs featuring audio plus a cross-platform compatible PDF booklet containing pillow shots (courtesy of Criterion Collection) and liner notes.

Each artist who appears on this release was asked to choose one or more "pillow shots" to use as inspiration for their pieces. A link to web pages containing a large assortment of pillow shots" was provided, and accordingly, the pillow shots were reserved on a first come, first served basis. The artists also watched the films from which the pillow shots came from in order to get a sense of how their chosen pillow shots were employed by Ozu.

The sound work featured represents a wide range of artistic approaches, but as always with these projects, the artists were chosen specifically, based on their previous work and on how it might contribute to the collective whole of each project.

Featured artists include:
ALEJANDRA & AERON
AONO JIKKEN ENSEMBLE
ASUNA
MARC BEHRENS
KEITH BERRY
LAWRENCE ENGLISH
HERIBERT FRIEDL
BERNHARD GUNTER
HACO
JOHN HUDAK
JASON KAHN
HITOSHI KOJO
KOURA
DALE LLOYD
YOSHIO MACHIDA
ROEL MEELKOP
KIYOSHI MIZUTANI
DEAN MOORE (with Michael Shannon)
STEVE RODEN
SAWAKO
MICHAEL SHANNON
STEINBRUCHEL
TAKU SUGIMOTO
SUKORA
TOSHIYA TSUNODA

At times, this release displays energetic jolts of adrenaline tempered with intermittent moments of late night contemplative quiescence. Abstract and surreal Escher-like moments appear into distant view like a half remembered dream, and acoustic and electronic Moebius sound strips suddenly launch without warning.

This is the first and/OAR CDR release using 2 color silk screen printing on the disc. Unfortunately, the true silver/silver discs cannot be used as before, but the disc company has assured that these discs are of the highest quality.

Limited to 100 copies.