NOT014 – Double CD Album – Release Date 15th October 2010
CD and digital via Not Applicable Bandcamp
vol 1 (total running time 51’30")
01 – entrance from the lungs
02 – retina’s tale
03 – neotenic traits
04 – breathe with your nose pt.1
05 – breathe with your nose pt.2 (just bathe in it)
06 – timeless cry
07 – urban intervention #7/24
08 – a passing moment
09 – why insist?
10 – please keep your dog on a leash
11 – spectral domain processing
12 – elegy and abandon
vol 2 – (total running time 48’15")
01 – entrance from the ears
02 – inescapable truths
03 – bodies and gens
04 – the drowning of ancestral myth
05 – modern bowels
06 – I lie down in storms (in thunder rise)
07 – skyscraper ledge dance
08 – oaksong
09 – scagrumptible
10 – isospatial species
11 – cock lays an egg
12 – exit (now leaping beyond, everything shatters)
Maurizio Ravalico – congas
Oren Marshall – tuba
Recorded in various locations throughout London by Isambard Khroustaliov.
Press Quotes:
"In Thunder Rise is – as if this wasn’t obvious enough already – pretty far from being a conventional duo album. As much as they are interacting with each other, they are responding to their environment: reacting to weather conditions with drones, creating the sound of a passing train with deep pulses, simulating mobile phone signal interference with staccato phrases, joining in others’ conversations, or even just evoking sensations of space, or of danger. This is far more than just an album of duets, this is an ensemble piece both featuring and dedicated to London, to its geography, to its networks, to its people, and to its moods. It is an album born of a love that cannot be shaken by downpours, by filthy streets, by the potential for violence, or even by missed buses." www.mapsadaisical.wordpress
"In Thunder Rise is a work of musical research that affirms a little Copernican revolution: the quest is not a linguistic one from the performers, but rather an active research by the listener. The listener finds himself searching for the sound produced by the musicians within the sound of the environment. To separate, to retrieve, to join, to measure the sounds, to present the ear with an excercise of attention and concentration, which we unconciously practice every day, all day; this is the cipher key of this double album."
Marco Franceschetti – www.openimpro.com
"Roger Turner would have been much more fun."
Dan Warburton – www.paristransatlantic.com
Album Description:
Recorded during the Summer of 2007, and taken through many phases of minute editing and poetic reframing, this peculiar album finally throws itself into the light, and opens up to outer criticisms and observations.
Maurizio Ravalico and Oren Marshall have performed extensively around the London’s improvised music venues circuit, and have explored in painstaking depth the relation between their two instruments, the tuba and the congas, before taking the decision of recording their first album entirely outdoors, within the varied urban environments of London.
Isambard Khroustaliov has sound engineered all the sessions, and was creatively involved in the project from the beginning. The performances were recorded using a technique established after few pilot sessions: a pair of microphones was placed fixed above the instruments, while, headphones on and with another stereo pair on a hand-held telescopic stand, Isambard was moving incessantly around the location, now getting closer to the instruments, now running away from them, now focusing on something else that was going on during the improvisations, making musical choices all along the recording process. Although he doesn’t produce any sound, Isambards’s presence can be heard throughout the album, in form of movement and sound depth, making this, under all perspectives, a trio work.
The tracks are arranged with disregard of their chronology, following rather a musical path, and fade into each other seamlessly, avoiding any artificial silence throughout the album. What would be in any other instances “background” becomes here an element of the orchestration, compositional accuracy being applied in choosing where and how to exit from one particular environment, and reveal the next.
The two volumes of In Thunder Rise are two uninterrupted journeys, each roughly 50 minutes each long, to be savoured with headphones on and closed eyes.
Go to the next page: Further Readings – a Literary Appendix