"This Being The Ballad of Kicking Giant, Halo: NYC/Olympia 1989-1993" is released today on drawingroomrecords.com thank you to Jeff Kuykendall for helping us to produce this beautiful artifact. 2LP • Gatefold • Heavyweight Vinyl • This album is dedicated to girls who walk like tigers, to the bold & the scorned, the fuck ups, the has beens, the drop outs, the shut ins and you. You were there when the cops shut the party down, you gave us floors and couches and dreamless sleep, we were there together. Thank you.
(In 200 Words, we highlight a new record we like a lot, via a 200-word review by Marc Masters and 200 words (or so) from the artist about whatever they choose.)
ASHLEY BELLOUIN - Ballads LP (Drawing Room)
The best drone music encompasses contradictions, particularly the seemingly paradoxical idea that one sound can be both soothing to the point of becoming a New Age spiritual remedy, and ominous to the point of being scarier than a horror movie. There’s a lot of room between those extremes, and when I’m really feeling (as in being struck like a tuning fork by) a drone, my mind flies and floats in and around that entire polar continuum.
The first full-length by Bay Area artist Ashley Bellouin swims in a wide ocean of calm and tension. Both side-length pieces have a tonal purity that’s hypnotically simple in the way Phill Niblock’s drones sound phenomenally focused. Yet there’s also a lot of texture and arc happening in each, as Bellouin uses her harmonium (plus a bunch of other instruments and collaborators) to make small shifts in timbre produce huge changes in direction and mood. The closest parallel I can think of in those terms is the deceptively-simple drone mastery of Duane Pitre, and even though Bellouin already has a sound that’s completely her own, I can imagine spending a very long stretch of time letting the music of both wave my inner tides.
– Marc Masters
ASHLEY BELLOUIN on Ballads
The two tracks on Ballads materialized from my fascination with harmoniums. I remember playing my harmonium one night and becoming fixated on the subtle beating patterns I could hear within each note. The imperfectly tuned reeds created shifting rhythmic patterns that seemed to dance through the air. I wanted to bring these rhythms to the forefront, isolate specific frequencies I was drawn to and mix them together to create my modified version of the harmonium. I was dissecting the sound and piecing it back together to form something new. The additional instrumentation (guitar, glass armonica, cello) all fell into place as that foundation was formed, naturally emerging from the constructed harmonium drone.
When working on these pieces I moved linearly. I let each sound guide me into the next. The trajectory of each piece unfolded like a narrative, which is where the title Ballads comes from. Although they lack traditional forms of narration, I view "Hummen” and "Bourdon” as stories, told with sound rather than words, that unravel and expand as time passes.
