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LP
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ELA 003LP
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$30.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 11/7/2025
Elations Recordings presents Depois do Silêncio, an intimate, forward-looking acoustic bass, digital keyboard and synthesizer recording by Brazilian avant-garde jazz luminaries Zeca Assumpção and Lelo Nazario. This release celebrates almost fifty years of the duo's friendship and musical affinity, continuing a musical dialogue between long-time collaborators. The duo began working together with Hermeto Pascoal's Grupo Vice Versa in the mid-1970s before forging one of Brazil's most adventurous experimental jazz groups Grupo Um in 1976; releasing three albums with a shared avant-garde and lateral, exploratory approach to sound fusing jazz and contemporary synthesis with expanded and prepared acoustic playing. Depois do Silêncio reflects the duo's long development of a shared conception of music, resulting in a work that is both timeless and modern. The music on the album was primarily recorded in Nazario's UTOPIA Studio, São Paulo, in 1994, featuring Assumpção on acoustic bass and Nazario on his newly acquired Ensoniq TS-12; these recordings were supplemented with acoustic bass for "Quintal da Memória" in 2018 and completed with an additional layer of rich, complex analog and virtual synthesis following their rediscovery of the material in 2022. Assumpção's deeply expressive acoustic bass playing forms the backbone of these compositions, augmented by Nazario's expansive and exploratory approach to synthesis, its constantly shifting timbres "making music a living organism, which adapts to situations as they appear." Nazario explains that "although the themes are written, much of the music is improvised based on an organic development of ideas, all intertwined and interrelated exactly as happens in a living organism." The album title Depois do Silêncio ("After Silence") references a phrase by the writer Aldous Huxley; "after silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." Assumpção and Nazario continue a search for new forms of musical expression, and here they succeed in creating music that "expand[s] the sound of musical instruments, so opening new horizons in the minds of listeners."
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LP
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ELA 002LP
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Recorded over a four-week period in early 2022, Freedom Lapse is the debut solo release of Australian multi-instrumentalist and composer, Adam Halliwell. A versatile improviser and lover of performance, Halliwell has been an active contributor to numerous musical communities in recent years. The release of Freedom Lapse marks an exciting stage in Halliwell's journey as an artist with the culmination of several important musical facets that are now becoming foundational to his practice. As Halliwell mentions, Freedom Lapse owes its genesis to an epiphanic moment experienced whilst traversing a mountainous passage in Mexico, a place where "the past present and future stretch out in one place". Entranced by this environment, its colors, the villages, and local life, Halliwell listened to music that inspires him (he cites Jon Hassell here). The result: "complete aural, visual, and spiritual completeness", a moment of discovery, he explains. Shortly after, the material that now comprises Freedom Lapse was recorded, distilling this powerful sensorial experience into a body of music that he has now invited the world to share with him. Throughout these recordings, restrained improvised phrases and melodic ideas feature, often appearing as long refrains that soar above idiosyncratic beds of fractured percussion and junkyard bass-work. This use of contrast, which is central to the work, allows Freedom Lapse to tap the lucidity-chaos juxtapositional-style that lies at the heart of all good music in the "fourth-world" idiom. Halliwell's sensitivity to dynamics, form and narrative is potent on these recordings, which allow his winding, free-improvisations the space to unfold and extend patiently. All instruments on Freedom Lapse were written and recorded by Haliwell, with additional trumpet on "Cygon Dance" supplied by regular collaborator, Reuben Lewis. Freedom Lapse was mixed and produced by Halliwell and Jim Rindfleish.
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LP
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ELA 001LP
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Spectra! represents a lone, anomaly release by illusive producer and recording artist J. Walker of Perth, Western Australia. Recorded and produced in 2016, Spectra! comprises a collection of 12 instrumental works composed in response to an imagined brief investigating the refined shades and pigments of color. Whilst stylistically somewhat comparable to library music recordings from Europe released throughout the 1980s, Walker's compositions never step too closely toward facsimile. Instead, they maintain a unique sense of identity, one closer akin to a born-too-late contemporary interpretation of the sentimentality and lost moods that allowed library music it's point of difference and charm in the first place. Unlike many modern artists who flirt with the past, Walker isn't concerned with carbon copying the sound palate and tape hiss of yesterday. In these works, antecedent emotional and harmonic bodies are given new life and form by means of modern studio hardware, musical equipment and compositional techniques. Recommended for fans of the Coloursound Library and Joël Vaandroogenbroeck.
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