Artists' Television Access

Tashi Wada

“Wada is obsessed by the brain scrambling properties of sustained tones and maximalist microtonal confusion and Alignment – written by Wada and performed on violin by Marc Sabat, best known for his Feldman interpretations – is a massive entry in the modern minimalist canon. Alignment is scored for eight violins in just intonation, cycling through the first 128 pitches of the harmonic series which are transcribed into one octave. It starts out as series of ‘simple’ descending tones before the violins come together in a beautiful organic bloom that just sort of hangs in the air and vibrates, sucking all of the light out of the room and generating a huge brain-fogging cloud of circling tones.” – Volcanic Tongue

Madison Brookshire

Madison Brookshire lives in Los Angeles, where he makes films, videos and music. He has shown his work at the New York Film Festival, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Los Angeles Filmforum, REDCAT and The Hammer Museum. He studied cinema at the California Institute of the Arts and Binghamton University and currently works as an educator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

En

“Another sublime drone album from the unshakably good Root Strata camp, En’s The Absent Coast is a real upper tier ambient release. Distinguished by its depth and effortless musicality, this album is one for genre fans to really savour. After the sandblasting noise/tonal onslaught of ‘A Dying Sun/Return To Holyoke’, the album calibrates itself to a stately simmer that comes to life during the quite sublime ‘Honeysuckle Heart’, which combines glassy sustains with crackling, overdriven harp-like string plucks to exquisite effect. Elsewhere, ‘Miramar’ conjures a horizontal bowed soundscape that’s somehow more visceral and emotive than the sum of its parts and the ionosphere-scraping ‘Pratyaya’ paradoxically combines Tim Hecker-style fiery arcs with the kind of effortless, droning sedation that Stars Of The Lid specialise in. Excellent.” – Boomkat

Paul Clipson

“The camera style is at once impressionistic in its technique and boldly graphic in its compositions, haunted by familiar visual forms that, loosed from conventional perspective, are revealed to carry unexpected resonances and rhythms. What do we see? A million suns, made multiple by the surface of water and the curve of the camera lens; neon signs; flitting vertical obstructions; telephone wires; vegetation; intimate, handheld disclosures of vast distances; architectural surfaces. As with Joris Ivens’ early shorts, Clipson’s films register the city in its minor variations. Within the frame, a storm of vision emerges of superimpositions, dissolves, rack focus, zooms, and the interlacing of color and black-and-white stocks. It often seems that the objects he films are bringing the camera into focus and not the other way around.” – San Francisco Bay Guardian

Radiant Husk

“The solo project of Matt Erickson, who plays saxophone as well as a skittering kitbag of post-electronic doodads. It manifests an interesting approach to tube-blowage with riffling drones extended by both mechanical and meta-mechanical techniques, and a very cool insertion of squeals inspired by Fire Music and industrial stamping machines in equal measure. It’s a release that ‘works’ on a number of levels, all of them decent.” – Byron Coley, The WIRE

Zach Iannazzi

“This is one of the most nightmarish films I’ve seen in a good long time and it’s not even a horror movie — unless you’re a fish. Iannazzi has compiled several found films of fish farming, slowed them down considerably and paired the images with a low, droning soundtrack. Fish — I think all the footage is of salmon, but I can’t say for certain — are thrown into lakes so they can populate and be fished down the line. Other female fish are captured and have their eggs squeezed out into buckets so they can be sifted later for what reason I don’t exactly know. It all ends up looking very diabolical, insidious and evil. Watching the film I thought if I saw this and I were a fish, I wouldn’t be able to sleep for a year. But then I thought, do fish even sleep?” – Bad Lit

Sean McCann

“If Sean McCann is a new name to your list of weirdo dronesters, you better get hip quick, McCann is one of the most prolific ambient artists of recent years, and has delivered countless offerings of violin based, long-tone beauty on almost every home-spun tape label around. And even though “Chances Are Staying” is McCann’s first attempt at vinyl glory, he’s no newcomer to the soft-drifting world of string-based soundscaping. What really draws us into McCann’s music is his signature, ever-changing kaleidoscopic whirl, sounds and notes constantly shifting and swirling over crumbling layers of noise and grit, never a boring moment in an ocean of crashing color and melodic smear, so propelling yet immersive and entrancing.” – Aquarius Records