#raglani

ASTRO / TV POW / RAGLANI / MAGIC MISSLE / MIKE SHIFLET / ERIC HALL

May 26, 2008

Please check out the new Raglani digital album Extinctions. Should appeal to fans of classic Musique Concrete, Noisers, Hauntology, and ambient musics.

Audio Cassette Tape 0018: Raglani / N.N.N. Cook “Split”

Author: Raglani / N.N.N. Cook

Title: Split

Performer: Raglani; N.N.N. Cook

Place of publication: St. Louis, Missouri, United States

Publisher: Close/Far Recordings; c/f 013

Release date: 2010

Pages: None

Dimensions: 4in x 2.75in

Cover: Cardstock with jewel case

Physical description: Cassette Tape

Binding: None

Process: Digital print

Color: Color

Edition size: 100

Edition number: None

ISBN: None

Notes: On the A side is a new track commissioned specifically for close/far recordings. Sig. to Ether Error seems to channel a distant astral oratorio. Slowly your mind's eye is activated and begins to build its own temple. Reconciling the synthetic with the organic, Raglani coaxes a state of concord between himself and his circuitry. On the B side the primary sound source is an electronic unit, the Meridian Box, custom designed and built by Joseph Kramer. It consists of six oscillators with independent pitch controls and electrodes controlled by body resistance. Otherness Figments immediately sweeps you into its current, enveloping your body with hum and crackle. Punctuated by blasts and tears in time, jarring moments begin to smear and stretch. As you pan across your barren destination, mirages dance across the landscape. Abruptly, your Dionysian journey ends in repose.; Design by N. Nolan Cook

Raglani - Real Colors of the Physical World [Editions Mego]

‘Real Colors of the Physical World is a title whose parameters of reference may at first seem obvious, but a moments consideration renders it strange. The physical world, as opposed to the phenomenal, is, as we are able to suppose through the insights of science, an invisible place, if it is even enough to count as a place. What, then, are the qualities being named here? By way of an answer, it is worth recalling that musique concrete has not only an historical but a conceptual priority over kosmiche musik. The concrete in the cosmic: electronic music concerned itself from the beginning with getting past the emotional, historical, and religious themes that had defined traditional composition in order to head straight into the very matter of sound. For the concrete composers, this meant literal experimentation, stretching, analyzing, and recombining the properties and limits of auditory material and its perception.

‘The kosmiche musicians conserved those approaches through metaphor as much as technique. The continuity between them involves a vocabulary of fundamental concerns: space, time, shapes, speed.... Electronic music arguably allowed for music to become actively self-reflexive, even ontological, for the first time. Its natural epic form has always been the cosmogony. The kosmiche focus on space travel and cybernetic futures has its roots in the earlier electro-acoustic renderings of a universe whose deepest origins are electrical and sonic. Two tacit, convergent metaphors structure the conceptual explorations of both approaches: that electronic composition accurately describes the activity of the human nervous system; and that cosmic evolution may be legitimately qualified as an act of modular synthesis. But much electronic music today has lost sight of the ambition to map that convergence, giving way instead to an emphasis on superficial prettiness, period nostalgia, the merely pleasant stupor of the New Age; or else to a vacuous static of technical fiddling.

‘Raglani has never abandoned the grand vision that distinguished his ancestors, and this is his most determinedly comprehensive piece of work. It revisits the promise in the electronic synthesis of sound, implicit from its beginning, to construct a plastic image of the imperceptible dynamics beneath the surface of the world. This is a drama realized at constantly telescoping scales, in all directions. If the disintegration of a divine voice into the skittering communications of machines, or the transformation of a densely alien jungle into the promise of personal redemption, can count as objects of experience, they can do so only here, through the condensation of sound. But this hectic, exotically diffuse rendering has more in common with the world as we know it than does the placid stability of actual things; inner life has its own geometry, its own physics. The cosmic in the concrete: real colors remain within. ‘Raglani has been making electronic music since he saw Otomo Yoshihide perform while under the influence of severe fever. This is his first full length album under his own name since 2006s Of Sirens Born.’

This is an interesting track from the archives. It was composed over a very long period of time. It features a few firsts for me. First time collaborating with C. Spencer Yeh who contributed the violin at the end of the track. It was also the first time I added modular synthesizer to one of my recordings. I purchased a basic A-100 system as I was finishing up the track and some FM got added to the end of the track in the 11th hour.  The track starts off with some creepy MG-1 swells and lots of edited field recordings. Of which I can hear Various thunder claps, rainstorms, cars, 4th of july festivities, gun shots from my old neighborhood, police sirens and a squeaky door that opens the track to it’s second section. 

Next is a very short sample of an old Italian madrigal which provides the drone. A melodica appears floating on top, Then there is a hyper edited “sword fight” that consisted of one sample that I took at work, of me pulling a sushi knife off of a magnetic strip. This edit took months to complete and it only lasts a few seconds. Next comes some eastern sounding de-tuned 12 string guitar. Spencer’s multi-tracked warbling violin resolves into a smooth drone as two FM’ing oscillators bring the track to a close.