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LP
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HG 2407LP
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Night Keeper is a collaborative album by New York City-based artist Aaron Landsman and former Swans guitarist Norman Westberg that is based on the former's eponymous play. Westberg recorded it together with performer Jehan O. Young for the Swiss Hallow Ground label, with Landsman serving as the record's producer. The original piece was first performed in the Spring of 2023 at The Chocolate Factory Theater in Queens and filled the stark industrial space with spoken text, choreography, projections, and music in dim light and, occasionally, complete darkness. Westberg and Young afterwards brought it to the studio to record it as a two-part album in whose course his textural sounds, based on loops and samples, set the stage for her soothing, sonorous vocal performance. Night Keeper is a performance inspired by sleeplessness and the wanderings of the human mind at night -- about time and memory. Westberg and Young elegantly capture its essence in these roughly 44 minutes with a somnambulic album, letting sound and meaning flow into each other. The initial spark for Night Keeper was a run of almost sleepless nights in different neighborhoods of a city that is perpetually insomniac. Instead of trying to force himself to go back to sleep by any means necessary, Landsman started writing down his thoughts. Accordingly, the texts that Young reads on the record form a diverse collection of specific moments, imagining different speakers and evoking different situations. Westberg complements, accentuates, and juxtaposes these with different means. Ominous drones, soaring melodies, rhythmic bass sounds. Landsman makes it clear that Night Keeper was intended as an invitation to "stay up, look out the window, let what's happening outside spark reveries or predictions« or even take it on a stroll through the neighborhood" at night, of course. Much like the original piece, this album is then one dedicated to wandering around, both mentally and physically.
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