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LP
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PL 089LP
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Glen was formed in 2015 in Berlin, Germany, by multi-instrumentalist and film score composer Wilhelm Stegmeier and Greek visual artist, film maker and musician Eleni Ampelakiotou. Coming from a cinematic background, and having collaborated on several films and audio-visual projects, they created Glen as a prismatic multi-faceted musical persona, which cannot be easily assigned to a specific genre. Listening to just one track or even one part of a track can misguide the impression of this album, like seeing just one single frame of a movie. As a mostly instrumental band with classic line up of two guitars, bass and drums, Glen deconstructs popular and classical music genres scratching them together with experimental expression and attitude. Minimalistic tonal sequences develop gradually, to complex fugues, interlacing crystal clear guitars with eclectic distortion, vibrating overtones, and shimmering sounds. The wave-like structured compositions approach, break on a chorus, to curl up in free improv or dissolve into a rhythmic torso. Even the mainly choral vocals, that you hear on this album appear as one element of composition, adding the quality and nature of human voices to the sound sculpture. With a glimpse of irony Glen revises the supposedly light atmosphere of melodic fragments to a complex epic multilayered hypnotic structure of free improvisation and repetitive themes, breaking loose either to Dionysian chaos or escaping to poetic cinematic soundscapes. Adding layer by layer, Glen creates a synthesis of contrasting textures with different references to no wave NY, free improv, noise, doom, postrock, minimal music, as well as cinematic scores merging to a unique sound of colorful narratives and surprising mosaics of rhythmic dissonant chords, melodic patterns, and abstract noise.
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