#pica disk

[musicmakesyousmart]

Jazkamer - Failed State of Mind

Pica Disk

2010

[dustedmagazine]

Okkyung Lee — Dahl-Tah-Ghi (Pica Disk)

Photo by Nigel Bates

Dahl-Tah-Ghi by Okkyung Lee

The Vigeland Park is one of Oslo, Norway’s biggest tourist destinations. Crowds gather year-round in its capacious green space, which contains over 200 oversized human forms sculpted by one of the nation’s most celebrated artists, Gustav Vigeland. Gus wasn’t the only artist in the family; working with oils and stained glass, his brother Emmanuel fashioned vivid images of spiritual events and sexual unions. His mausoleum, which is situated in a distant Oslo neighborhood, is a windowless space that contains the artist’s ashes and a vast, erotic fresco. Even vaster is the room’s acoustic character, which drastically amplifies even small sounds. That is where cellist Okkyung Lee recorded her latest solo album, Dahl-Tah-Ghi (Moon Gliding).

Lee is a Korean cellist who has been based in the USA since the 1990s. She is an inveterate and restless collaborator, whose c.v. includes work with Christian Marclay, Laurie Anderson, Swans, Ellen Fullman and John Zorn. In 2012 Lee tapped Lasse Marhaug to record Ghil, an LP of raw solo performances captured by an old tape deck in various locations around Norway. To celebrate the record’s release in June 2013, she played two concerts at the Emmanuel Vigeland Mausoleum, one for the general public and another for 30 invited friends. A recording of the second concert became Dahl-Tah-Ghi. 

Both timing and setting influence this album’s extraordinary character. Lee had already had a chance to experience the space’s 18-second natural reverberation, so there’s an informed and purposeful quality to her experiments with the mausoleum’s sound. The room isn’t just a setting; it’s part of the score. At some points she plays very sparsely, letting the room draw out the grain of single bowed notes. At other moments she plays quite loudly and densely, mixing low strokes with hard smacks to create rapidly mutating audio-compounds. The sonic material is close to that on Ghil. But where that LP rendered sound events like blown-up snapshots, the music here progresses scene by scene, each moment discrete but shaped by the events surrounding it, rather like the frescos on the walls around the cellist.   

Bill Meyer

[dustedandsocial]

(Source)

[musicmakesyousmart]

Birchville Cat Motel - Gunpowder Temple of Heaven

Pica Disk

2008

[musicmakesyousmart]

Yuen Chee Wai & Lasse Marhaug - In Praise of Shadows

Pica Disk

2018

[tomdork]

Dahl-Tah-Ghi by Okkyung Lee

Pica Disk

[thenewobjective]

Sult / Lasse Marhaug ~ Harpoon

Sult / Lasse Marhaug ~ Harpoon

Thanks, perhaps, to Melville’s Moby-Dick, the Harpoon easily elicits images of open sea hunting and a grand existential confrontation with nature made strange by the roar of storms and the inhuman scales of oceans. The improv trio Sult and extreme musician / producer Lasse Marhaug evoke here the thunder of metals twisting and clashing, the heavy groans of materials pushed to their very limits in…

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[the13thtrack]

This massive slab of wax just arrived in the mail the other day. PBK and Jim O'Rourke's collaboration Unidentified Again is breathtaking. A free-flowing album that just begs you to get lost deep into its sound world.

Available via Pica Disk.