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2CD
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SHELTER 086CD
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Since 2014, Shelter Press has been steadily releasing a multi-volume series of documents showcasing Gabriel Saloman's music for contemporary dance. Under the title of Movement Building, these albums have covered a wide breadth of themes and approaches, all of them coalescing around Saloman's darkly cinematic approach to contemporary guitar music. Known for his part in the seminal electronic-noise duo Yellow Swans (alongside Pete Swanson), Saloman has taken the sweeping drones and fried electricity of his former band and embedded them within an expanding palette of bowed strings, martial percussion, and resonant piano. Here, Shelter Press collect all three volumes of this vinyl-only series -- Movement Building Vol. I (SHELTER 051LP, 2014); Vol. II (SHELTER 063LP, 2015); and Vol. III (SHELTER 085LP, 2017) -- as a double-CD, featuring new artwork, previously unreleased tracks, a new digital master by Helmut Erler (Dubplates & Mastering), and an extensive essay on dance, politics, and the themes of each album written by Saloman. The first disc collects Movement Building Vol. I and Vol. II, the latter a sprawling 36-minute epic that had previously been separated into two discreet tracks for vinyl and is collected here as one continuous piece, moving through an extended set of drone and loping drum play before climaxing in the kind of glorious guitar chording associated with groups such as My Bloody Valentine, GSYBE, or Mono. Movement Building Vol. II explores various combinations of drum and drone, ASMR inducing high-end clatter and Saloman's infamous take on Miles Davis's classic "My Funny Valentine". The second disc collects Movement Building Vol. III, including two tracks not available on the vinyl version. On Vol. III, the emotive and disorienting bowed guitar, militant percussion, and searing guitar eruptions of earlier albums are joined by other familiar Saloman sounds: shoegaze washes of distorted guitar, minimalist piano attacks, melancholy guitar melodies, and a patina of perfectly-placed harsh noise. Saloman's music has never sat comfortably in any genre, sharing with a select cohort of other artists (Stephen O'Malley, Lawrence English, Grouper, Kreng, Tim Hecker, among others) an ambiguous position overlapping "modern classical", "electronic music", and the more outer limits of "ambient metal". The recordings collected in Movement Building doesn't clarify as much as it expands Saloman's oeuvre further into an idiosyncratic musical no-man's land that fails to be faithful to any popular musical trend. An absolutely necessary document for any fan of Saloman's work. Design by Bartolomé Sanson.
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LP
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SHELTER 085LP
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Shelter Press has present the third and final volume of Gabriel Saloman's Movement Building series. For fans of Saloman's post-Yellow Swans work -- an already dense catalog of darkly cinematic compositions mostly conceived as accompaniment to some of Vancouver's edgier contemporary dance companies -- Movement Building Vol. III is not only a much anticipated conclusion to this trilogy, it is the most fully realized album in years. Whereas Movement Building Vol. I (SHELTER 051LP, 2014) and Vol. II (SHELTER 063LP, 2015) acted primarily as documentation of time-based artworks, Movement Building Vol. III offers a more coherent and narratively rich album that will appeal to admirers of Soldier's Requiem (MIA 026CD/LP, 2013). Listeners will recognize the emotive bowed strings, militant percussion, and searing guitar eruptions that evoked memory and trauma in that previous album. Joining this pallet are other familiar Saloman sounds: shoegaze washes of distorted guitar, minimalist piano attacks, melancholic appregiated melodies, and a patina of harsh noise. Added to this is a more 21st century approach to drums and bass, perhaps an effect of his collaborations with producer Michael Red in their dub ambient project Chambers. Saloman's music has never sat comfortably in any genre, sharing with a select cohort of other artists (Stephen O'Malley, Lawrence English, Grouper, Kreng, Tim Hecker, among others) an ambiguous position between "modern classical", "electronic music", and the more outer limits of metal. Movement Building Vol. III doesn't clarify as much as it expands Saloman's oeuvre further into an idiosyncratic musical no-man's land that fails to be faithful to any popular musical trend -- contemporary, retro, or futurist. Movement Building Vol. III's themes are taken from the dance it was composed for, 2015's What Belongs To You, created by long-time collaborator Vanessa Goodman. That work sent its dancers through a physical journey exploring the needs of the body, for shelter, for love, and for self-actualization, roughly aligned to Abraham Maslow's "hierarchy of needs". Though this record was recorded in 2015, Movement Building Vol. III could be the perfect album for the current era of civilizational near-collapse, whether at the hands of maniacal politicians, the slow burn of the Anthropocene, or the constant enclosure of the corporate-driven, social media enabled surveillance state. The collection of these works allows one to see clearly Saloman's techniques and approaches to a relatively limited number of instruments -- guitar, percussion, occasional piano, and tape.
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LP
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SHELTER 063LP
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Gabriel Saloman presents the second volume in his Movement Building trilogy, continuing the release of original compositions commissioned for contemporary dance works. Following the enthusiastically received first installment -- Vol. 1's album-length The Disciplined Body (SHELTER 051LP, 2014) -- Saloman offers up five tracks that combine shimmering bowed guitars and reverberant acoustic percussion into a meditative and powerful break from anything he's produced before. Mobilizing the frequencies of contemporary electronic music (fine-tuned to speaker-rattling effect by Helmut Erler at Berlin's Dubplates & Mastering), Movement Building Vol. 2 abandons the conventional instrumentation- and genre-motifs embraced by many of Saloman's peers in favor of a unique hybrid of avant-drone, psych-rock, and Japanese traditional music. In 2013 Saloman was commissioned by the Vancouver, Canada-based dance company 605 Collective to collaborate on the multimedia dance performance The Sensationalists (2015). An early inspiration for both The Sensationalists and the music collected in Movement Building Vol. 2 was Yasunari Kawabata's 1956 novel Snow Country; its tragic love affair became a thematic and contextual source for early phases of the project, and much of the music on this album is a result. Borrowing compositionally and tonally from Taiko drums and Gagaku (an ancient drone-based imperial court music), Saloman reproduced sounds originating in traditional Japanese drums, wind, and string instruments almost completely on guitar, ride cymbals, and snare drum. This influence is most explicit in the undulating rhythms that open the first side of Vol. 2 ("Contained Battle/Ascend") and the layered escalation of "Gagaku," a methodical combination of rhythm and drone that climbs to a peak of psych-tinged burning guitar lines. Concluding the album is a version of Miles Davis's classic ballad, "My Funny Valentine," an uncanny combination of original percussion and guitar, collaged together with what may be a live recording of Davis's "second great quintet" taken from YouTube, processed, and time-stretched on tape. Just as Saloman's previous output has combined cinematic atmospheres with guitar-driven climaxes that easily appeal to fans of neo-classical experimentalism and post-rock-informed drone, this record opens new compositional territory while maintaining a recognizable melancholy ambience. Exposure to the monolithic bass and open spaces of dub-influenced EDM has led Saloman in a different direction than many of his peers (including artists such as Cut Hands, Vatican Shadow, and former Yellow Swans bandmate Pete Swanson) and toward something that moves bodies and triggers their nerve endings, but with no concession to the dancefloor.
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LP
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SHELTER 051LP
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Gabriel Saloman has developed a reputation for releasing penetrating works of haunting beauty in his new role as a solo performer and composer. Known for his part in the seminal electronic-noise duo Yellow Swans (alongside Pete Swanson), Saloman has taken the sweeping drones and fried electricity of his former band and embedded them within an expanding palette of bowed strings, martial percussion and resonant piano. The majority of his work to date has been developed as music for contemporary dance, exemplified by two solo albums with Miasmah, 2012's melancholic Adhere (MIA 021LP) and last year's celebrated ode to mud and decay Soldier's Requiem (MIA 026CD/LP). As he continues to prolifically produce music for dance, Saloman has developed a new series with Shelter Press to make these works available: Movement Building. The first of two volumes to be released individually on vinyl and together on CD, "The Disciplined Body" is a 34-minute work that moves through ghostly minimalist drones, poly-vocal drumming and culminates in an aching climb through sheets of shimmering guitar chords before erupting in a violent spurt of harsh noise. While at its climax it may be evocative of transcendental string manglers ranging from My Bloody Valentine to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, in its more subtle moments it wades through the kind of blackened water that suggests the outer boundaries of ambient metal, or the ghostly remnants of a cassette dub of beatless electronics. Composed for Daisy Karen Thompson's "Re-Marks on Source Material," the music shares that dance's Foucault-influenced questioning of the limits imposed on our bodies by technology and labor, reaching for an ecstatic escape from discipline and control. Listeners may want to reach for the same -- to do so we suggest they play this recording very, very loud. Mastered and cut by Helmut Erler at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. All music by GMS (guitar, percussion). Recorded at 611 Alexander and SFU SCA in Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories, Spring and Summer 2013.
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10"
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IGR 001EP
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One-sided cherry red vinyl. Screen-printed B-side by master screen-printer, Ulrich Schmidt-Novak. Composed for a dance of the same name, choreographed by Daisy Karen Thompson. Gabriel Saloman (Yellow Swans, Mudsuckers) begins Riots Don't Just Happen with a shuddering drum roll before settling into a series of brooding, rumbling guitar drones. Military drums disrupt the standoff and with this call to arms, tension swiftly mounts as the atmosphere becomes denser and increasingly claustrophobic. Handmade artwork by Paul McDevitt & Cornelius Quabeck using a Risograph printer in combination with spray paint. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Numbered edition of 300 which will not be repressed. Includes a photograph, insert, and download code.
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CD
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MIA 026CD
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Gabriel Saloman furthers his dive into the dynamics of sound and delivers four pieces of intense yet restrained requiems set to piano, guitar, and drums with Soldier's Requiem, his follow-up to last year's highly-emotive record Adhere. Although touching on his past in Yellow Swans (with Pete Swanson), Saloman continues to explore the noises within rather than the purely physical component of his former collaborator. That's not saying this is lighthearted material. Quite the contrary. This is an album that needs to be experienced on proper volume for potential heart-stopping effect. Sounding as if you may be the last person left on earth, Soldier's Requiem guides you through rain-filled open spaces, epic showdowns and abandoned cities. The debris is floating and in the shadow lurks a guitar-picking Vincent Gallo. Meanwhile, there seems to be marching bands closing in on all fronts while a punk band playing Tim Hecker tracks can be heard from the horizon. Soldier's Requiem confirms Saloman as a man able to further his own musicality while regaining the key elements to his recipe. This is music for modern decay and melancholy.
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LP
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MIA 026LP
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LP version with download code. Gabriel Saloman furthers his dive into the dynamics of sound and delivers four pieces of intense yet restrained requiems set to piano, guitar, and drums with Soldier's Requiem, his follow-up to last year's highly-emotive record Adhere. Although touching on his past in Yellow Swans (with Pete Swanson), Saloman continues to explore the noises within rather than the purely physical component of his former collaborator. That's not saying this is lighthearted material. Quite the contrary. This is an album that needs to be experienced on proper volume for potential heart-stopping effect. Sounding as if you may be the last person left on earth, Soldier's Requiem guides you through rain-filled open spaces, epic showdowns and abandoned cities. The debris is floating and in the shadow lurks a guitar-picking Vincent Gallo. Meanwhile, there seems to be marching bands closing in on all fronts while a punk band playing Tim Hecker tracks can be heard from the horizon. Soldier's Requiem confirms Saloman as a man able to further his own musicality while regaining the key elements to his recipe. This is music for modern decay and melancholy.
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LP
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MIA 021LP
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When legendary noise duo Yellow Swans dissolved just prior to releasing Going Places, it left in its wake two musicians with very distinct but very different voices. Pete Swanson's post-YS technoid experimentations have been well documented, but that still leaves Gabriel Saloman, who, after leaving the group, buried himself headfirst in sounds and images that were possibly even further away from his comfort zone. Adhere is Saloman's first "proper" solo album, and it finds him stripping away the blood, sweat and tears of his old band, revealing a rich seam of ominous restraint. Delicately-picked strings, piano and hocking woodblock percussion are drowned in reverb and drawn out in cold anguish giving a cracked, minimalist mirror to the work of fellow Miasmah alums Kreng or Elegi. A softly-spoken record, while Adhere pushes away Saloman's noise history, none of his well-documented intensity is discarded and lost. Instead, the blistering punk nihilism is allowed to simmer and boil over in different ways, and the occasional moments of post-Cocteau Twins shimmering bliss we could just about make out on Going Places are now given a chance to shine in all their glory. Adhere is a surprising, challenging and perfectly-paced album, and fits into its very own niche, ushering in a new generation of listeners to Saloman's distorted, hazy vision. Includes mp3 download.
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