John Chantler - Automatic Music For Erik Griswold

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3...according to our Clinton on Fri 11 Nov, 2011.

Ah, that Erik Griswold. You'd have to be bloody Shoestring to work out whats going on here. No title, no artist, no record label, no titles on the inner label. On the A side some kind of completely unlistenable modular synthesizer dirge, on the flip a bagpipe (ok its 'a reed organ' apparently) playing one note. Get your old Bontempi organ out - tape a note down and walk away. You'll get the same effect. There are a couple of wonderful vocal drones on top but alas that was Dave over there attempting to harmonize. I've just flipped the track ahead 10 minutes and...THERE IS A DIFFERENT NOTE. If he's not careful he'll be tagged as a progressive rock wannabe.

This LP collects two different pieces recorded in December 2010 and sometime in 2009 – both offering different fields of surface stasis/hidden activity…

The first, ‘Automatic Music for Erik Griswold’ was recorded in Bundaberg, Australia using a ‘Eurorack’ modular synthesiser plugged into a borrowed guitar amplifier. It was made in preparation for a concert in Osaka in January 2011 organised by Tetsuya Umeda and was an experiment in using the synthesiser without any external controller (I’d just been touring with Tujiko Noriko and Lawrence English and had grown accustomed to playing the synth with a Roland SH101 as keyboard/sequencer). It is named for Erik Griswold, a pianist living in Brisbane, Australia, whose exceptional ‘Wallpaper Music’ recording was part inspiration for this work.

The second side is the older piece. Recorded at home in London, UK using two reed organs (one Hohner, one Busilaccio) and recorded to an Akai GX4000D 1/4" reel-to-reel. This is my homage to the lineage of pieces focussed on frequency beating cycles that most actively crossed my radar with Jim O’Rourke’s ‘Two Organs’. Jokingly a ‘cover’ of said piece, the working title for the recording was ‘Biting The O’Rourke That Feeds’ before I later settled on nicking the title of a rather lovely upbeat Tenniscoats song as a sly nod to the seasonly themed (and vastly superior) records of my good friend and ongoing inspiration Lawrence English who mastered the record and to whom I owe many ongoing thanks…

Pressed in an edition of 110 LPs with a two colour screenprint sleeve made from archival grade photokraft paper using a drawing by Marcus Cope.

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