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CD
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R 072CD
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Sean McCann on the release (January 2020): "Ten Impressions dates from the fall of 2010, when I moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I was contemplating starting Recital at this time, envisioning the first release to be a double-LP of my ambient, slow works. Amassing violin and piano fragments over the next months, I ended up with over four hours of recorded material. Well, then... I sat and looked at the files on my computer and lost all interest. An odd gapping period overtook me and I stopped working on music. Twiddling my time, my listening interest in classical and art-y avant grade music flourished. A year later, or so, I waded back to the pool of strings and keys and thought, 'oh, well, some of these still feel nice.' So, I opened the chest again. I knew this would be the last 'ambient' record I would make for the foreseeable future (still mostly true). I sculpted them lightly, to a sort of pastoral sadness. Working again on these pieces was familiar and easy. This was just before the obsessive editing microscope was glued above my eye (trying to rip it off, now, though). Ten Impressions is available as a clean CD now. I appreciate the confidence from Root Strata (who originally published this as an LP in 2015). So, thank you Maxwell August Croy and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. This is my most Eno/Budd effort, and I feel the recordings stand well ten years later... Not as an Eno/Budd record, but as a taste of what was before and, if I never got into Fluxus and sound poetry, what could have continued to happen." Four-page pamphlet holding program notes; gatefold wallet; Edition of 200.
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LP
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R 069LP
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Sean McCann on Puck (September 2019): "Puck is here. Music For Public Ensemble (R 022LP), my previous album, was released three years ago. And three years before that was Private Ensemble. Puck is both public and private in nature. A smear of chamber works from Stockholm, Moscow, New York, and Kansas. Three aged personal recordings from 2008, 2009, and 2010 are also poured in the batter: a bedroom violin trio, ambient music, and a sad plucked guitar piece. A marbled blend of new chamber works and older, boisterous recordings from the late-2000s. The first side is subtitled 'Folded Portraits' -- a three-part suite: 'Nightfall', 'Broth', and 'Damals': German for 'back then' (or Remember When: the lowest form of conversation). The spine of it is an informal rehearsal session of Portraits of Friars (2018). Recorded at the fabled Fylkingen in Stockholm, the ten-person text and chamber piece grows and shrinks. False starts and stops and tests are outlined with the black ink of editing. Little moments become big moments. Nailed above that spine is Folded Rose (2018), a piece for piano and humming. A dainty march out of context, immersed in recordings of me gagging and yowling in my car. Sound artist Lia Mazzari shared the titular spoken piece with me. 'Puck,' a duet for dialogue about eggs and jewelry, premiered at Café OTO in 2018. I recorded my text in a dark bathtub in Toronto on my 30th birthday last year. The text is a mold growing on top of a quintet I wrote called Vilon (2017), sweetly performed by the Russian Kymatic Ensemble. Jackson Graham, skilled American percussionist, is a rod bolted through the album. He commissioned a work by me called Violet Fat (2017), which is spliced across both sides, hammered and bent to fit in place. A fusion of jubilation and gut clenching, Puck balances on the rooftop, tipping side to side in the fog." Includes 12-page "Puck" pamphlet and two art cards with program notes and recollections. Edition of 500.
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CD/BOOK
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R 050CD
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Saccharine Scores is an album/art book documenting Sean McCann's recent chamber compositions. Ranging from the 10-person ensemble performance of "Portraits of Friars" at Fylkingen, Stockholm in February 2018, to his first quartet piece "Victorian Wind", performed in Toronto in 2014. McCann's scores leak pastoral and bizarre passages, dancing in the banal beauty of sound poetry. The performances feature guest musicians Sarah Davachi, Zachary Paul, Geneva Skeen, Celia Eydeland, Maxwell August Croy, and more. The book holds in-depth scores, program notes, and photography by McCann, a lovely complement to finger through while you lay down to listen to the disc. The notes for "Pistons" follow here: "I assembled this piece while wanting to make my life of leisure and gluttony in London somehow artistic. I was in London for a week or ten days in October 2017 for a business trip. I love London. I love doing two things at a time or more. So it worked out. I find I have a hard time enjoying anything unless I am multitasking. For example, right now as I type this description I am also drinking old coffee with ice-cubes in it, exporting a master from Pro-Tools downstairs, and watching Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985) on the television set. So in this British multitasking, I decided to work on a piece of music while indulging in food and drink roaming around London. I was also reading Baudelaire's Les Fleurs Du Mal (1857) during these outings (talk about sentimental). Some elements of those poems crept their way, drawn out of order, into Celia's singing text. As with all my compositions to this point, they are left open to interpretation: no real meaning, just flickers of settings and emotions. The taste of everything below (the score) spawned thoughts of colors and elements and people and emotions, though with the text I decided to keep it simply about the food and the beverages. The romantic music and singing is the rendering of the emotions I felt, while my banal reading was the actual act of consumption. I recorded the text while lying down in my childhood bedroom in Goleta, California, half asleep just trying to get it over with. It was a fitting situation for the piece: forced beauty." Edition of 200, signed and numbered with 132-page 6″ x 9″ book.
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2LP
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R 022LP
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2016 release. Music For Public Ensemble is the first full-length album by Sean McCann since 2013's Music For Private Ensemble (R 005LP). Three years in the making, Public Ensemble employs the talents of many Recital allies; a mélange of voices and instruments: violin, viola, cello, contrabass, piano, bass clarinet, tenor saxophone, flute, trumpet, trombone, clarinet, pedal-steel, koto, electronic keyboards (organ, Farfisa, harpsichord), percussion, other sounds, tape, and a lamp. Many of the pieces include recited text; reflections stemming from McCann's book Pacifics (R 014BK, 2016). The narrative is meaningless or meaningful. Produced and arranged by McCann in Los Angeles, California. Personnel: Ben Baker Billington, Andrew Chalk, Kayla Cohen, Ian William Craig, Maxwell August Croy, Sarah Davachi, Hank Doyle, Matthew Erickson, Scott Foust, Rob Frye, Celia Hollander, Seth Kasselman, Graham Lambkin, Gabi Losoncy, Rob Magill, Sean McCann, Erica McLachlin, Dave McPeters, Nour Mobarak, Allen Mozek, Tom James Scott, Zachary Paul Schwartz, Troy Schafer, Cameron Stallones, Nick Storring, Matthew Sullivan, Lillian Paige Walton, and the Rose-Paste Chorale, featuring: Kayla Cohen, Maxwell August Croy, Morgan Fox, Spencer Grady, Ursula Grady, Benjamin Lovell, Greg Manata, Erica McLachlin, Crystal Myslajek, Matthew Sage, Paula Schanes, Zachary Paul Schwartz, and Alex Twomey. Includes a 12-page pamphlet with texts, program notes, and artwork; Includes download coupon; Edition of 500.
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Book
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R 014BK
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Sean McCann presents his first book, Pacifics. An excerpt from the book: "Always the hours of dawn his cream pastes its lettuce Black: The bedding circles sauces in day-board singes picked just-fine. Light Glides, carved fresh its hues reliving a hampered gloomy due, to soft-lit love slowing the support of overcast of whispering ivory absences and rose fat. In small-town exits, her regret set his ill-health. Lead was Noble with her sapping fan of ear, with my own winter a cedarwood you face, Lapping on grapes. Pearling raining on houses speaking pearl and wine and nightly Is Sophie and trickling anyway, Exerts the rain and cloth very before acting. Cream-like impressions among her much raining, Enters seaweed capping off suns, hooked a Well Recital of consumption. Either coppery, red to the raining jet of wildly left ribbons. This green our cloth of led towards the bricks. All possible in that detuning globe- flash gone lover's fading a dead different, flowering petal-blue. Spheres Pouring-pouring from owners in An over potion the oven very-slow. West cellars; or farm-lit Pouring coppery, moaning far ribbons flapping anyone soy The lobsters mist but rose in keeps on gushing her urn. Fortunately, night cordially implies, a true Silver of sapphire too green and red and but who's swimming - and fishing. A singeing into You pearling green, coffee-tongued richness by the shore out Never befell ripping too that chewy, argued water. a fallacy bitter of their History the favorite is obscurity, a pointy take are to white the bouquet, ever in texture but the fruity, gaps wording a crock you sapphire doesn't orchestra ever the snow by growing minutes I ribbon coppers oven and now retire on the cliff anyway, pedestal been it the paaare their call hard sapphire cut or spend smoker his petaling Pacific" Second Edition; Softbound book; 65 pages; Edition of 100.
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LP
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ZORN 007LP
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Restocked; 2011 release. Second vinyl release The Capital by rising drone star Sean McCann. These recordings prove -- once again -- his ability to keep his stretched-out and richly-textured ambient drones right on track. The A-side opens with synth spirals and ecstatic sounds -- there's no going back now. The B-side is full of violin explorations and lo-fi field recordings. This is an amazing effort by one of Earth's most promising musicians.
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LP
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RS 092LP
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The definitive version of this triptych of tectonic drift originally released as a CD-R on Sean McCann's own Recital label in 2011. "Our Silhouette," which blankets the whole of the first side with jewel-like piano runs and distant fading synths, may be one of the artist's most elegant moves. The reverse holds two tracks of long-form organ/string plateaus that float elegantly in space, refracting light and sound in patterns around the head.
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LP
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DNT 056LP
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"Debut vinyl release from Californian droniac Sean McCann. Recorded in the summer of 2009, this album was meant to be a continuation of the kaleidoscopic sound of his first albums, Phylum Sigh and Frame Of Mind. While still beaming with beauty and grace, this record demands a bit more from the listener than his other works. The first side of Chances Are Staying explores stringed melodic minimalism ala Tony Conrad, yet with much more poignant and somber motifs. The second side displays the ambit of his sound, from rapturous (and even ... grooving?!) violin and saxophone blurs to ecstatic mind-warps. This record stands as a pillar in the dawn of this young man's career. Guaranteed to make your heart shine with memories of affection and glimpses of an uncertain future. Full color matte jackets with insert -- in a hand-numbered edition of 400 mastered by Pete Swanson."
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