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PRICE: $13.00
IN STOCK
ARTIST
TITLE
What Are the Roots That Clutch
FORMAT
CD

LABEL
CATALOG #
HMS 022CDHMS 022CD
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
7/3/2012


"It was a cavernous tone that broadcast from a ventilator duct that inspired Patrick McGinley to begin collecting field recordings and working them into his slow-arc compositions. At the time, when he heard that particular tone in that particular city at that particular time, he had no gear or recording device on hand. Over the next fifteen years (and counting) McGinley has eased into a peripatetic lifestyle, wandering the European countryside and forests (but never straying too far from the thrum and spark of civilization) in search of the same epiphany with his head rattled to the sound of a cavernous air duct. The five chapters of this album can't easily be associated with any specific location; instead McGinley overlaps and crosshatches his field recordings and abstractions into acousmatic passages with ghostly, half-melodic qualities. Even the two unprocessed recordings of the album are impossibly complex in their accretions of sound. McGinley's composed pieces embrace lithe, mysterious drones whose mossy, damp atmosphere perfectly situate with tactile crunches, tactile events, and signal noise generation. Eels and leeches would not be out of place in such an environment; but the sub-aquatic murk snaps into a hallowed manifestation of ritualized minimalism at the album's finale, one that LaMonte Young and Angus MacLise might have conjured in 1968 with clattering percussive elements and a hypnotic blur of harmonic drone."