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CD
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CSR 341CD
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The brand-new album from 400 Lonely Things. Tumble back into the nebulous and murky psychedelic haze of '70s-'80s VHS horror! Explore grimy palimpsests from the film studio to the grindhouse with 400 Lonely Things in The New Twilight: eleven creepy yet sublime analogue microdoses of vintage genre and exploitation audio sampled and filtered through the darkly ambient, melodically droning, melancholic nerd soul. CD pack includes a fascinating booklet of tantalizing visual clues! It's been said by many over the years that horror is the most flexible genre. So many ideas, themes, and styles flow through it. Craig Varian of 400 Lonely Things has spent a half-century on earth exploring almost all of it, and finds a particular sweet spot in the glut of films released in the VHS boom of the '80s. Varian developed a fascination for the worlds of sound revealed by audio sampling after first encountering an Ensoniq Mirage in the 1980s. While he found sampling music interesting and often surprising, it was the overlooked moments in the audio environments of horror films in particular that seemed to provide the most fertile wealth of inexplicably sublime material. More often than not, samples from these sources seemed eager to twist themselves into moments of smeary, effusive beauty and when looped and treated, often veered directly into mysterious assemblies of warm melancholia -- meditative poetics that were never implied in their lurid lo-fi grindhouse presentations. And, of course, sometimes they were just creepy. While a couple previous releases by 400 Lonely Things in this realm have focused on specific film-titles with similar results, their 17th album The New Twilight is the first 400 Lonely Things release to take a slight step back to widen that perspective a bit, to focus on the overall genre itself. With the exception of one single track, each song (and song title) is sourced from a single film. To further this theme, the chronologically ordered booklet included in the physical packaging uses the same techniques to extract a hazy and dreamlike visual reference from the murky celluloid sources.
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CD
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CSR 319CD
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The new album from 400 Lonely Things, produced by William Basinski, is a dark ambient, sample-based séance to the Banning Mill -- a real-life decaying "mansion" and haven for artists, freaks, and misfits in the backwoods of the American Deep South in the 1970s-1990s -- and an extraordinary piece of art that lived there. An archaeological excursion in found sound -- wandering through the art and memory of a real place, Mother Moon is an origin story for 400 Lonely Things. In the '90s, Craig Varian was fortunate enough to frequent the Mill in the years before it closed. It was here that he was exposed to the artwork of Richard Scott Hill, whose artwork "Minotauress" graces the album cover. His work both captured and fed into the Mill's sinister yet playful undercurrents of mania and depression. This album, born out of that first visit to the Mill, is an imaginary soundtrack to the many years of solitude the Minotauress spent hanging in the musty, secret winding halls of Banning Mill. Since the days of the Mill (and Varian's subsequent purchase of "Minotauress" shortly before the Mill closed), Craig Varian, along with best friend and late musical partner Jonathan McCall, found a thread of music they'd been consistently making yet had previously failed to notice -- melancholic instrumentals with weathered sampling at its core -- going back to their earliest recordings in the late 1980s. Eventually, this music was called 400 Lonely Things. Six-panel, spot-varnished digipak. "Mother Moon is a cypher that saves an important hidden fragment of cultural history from erasure" --Ben Ponton, Zoviet France. "Mother Moon is darkness calling. It will take you to the outer limits and leave you there. Guaranteed to twist your mind" --Andrew Hulme, O Yuki Conjugate. "A wistful, burrowing, beautiful nightmare." --Daniel Kraus (NY Times best-selling author of The Living Dead with George A. Romero, and The Shape Of Water with Guillermo Del Toro)
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