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- Date Released: November 11, 2008
- Genre: Electronic
- Style: Electronic Experimental
- Label: Anticipate Recordings / Iris
"Dance music" for species in hibernation
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We Say...
Surfaces of a Broken Marching Band expands upon the warm, occasionally beat-driven ambient style that New York's Ezekiel Honig previously explored on his previous albums Scattered Practices and Early Morning Migration, a collaboration with Morgan Packard. The record opens with a muddy pool of acoustic samples, slowed and looped out of phase in a way that recalls Philip Jeck's turntable experiments. Jeck's fondness for repetition, and of cryptic musical phrases, informs much of Honig's approach, actually; but rather than vintage thrift-store vinyl, Honig's sources lie in field recordings and his own home recordings of brushed percussion or out-of-tune piano. Fennesz's lush fields of buzzing guitars are another point of reference for Honig's music — particularly on tracks like "Seaside Pastures Part 2," which smears scattered Rhodes notes like so many grapes against an infinitesimal digital sieve.
You can hear Honig's grounding in techno occasionally, surfacing in the loping 4/4 kicks of the title track or the house-inspired handclaps of "A Brief Visual Pattern." But these club-music signifiers are torn free from their moorings and cast adrift in a sea of wilting pianos and droning horns; this is "dance music" only for species in hibernation. The entire album sounds a lot like one might imagine hibernation to feel, in fact: close but not claustrophobic, with furry warmth slowing the brain to a crawl inside a mossy burrow's womb. -
They Say...
Surfaces of a Broken Marching Band is Ezekiel Honig's second release (after the Microcosm Music 2006 release Scattered Practices) and his first appearance on his own Anticipate label. As expected, the album is in tune with the label sound Honig had already established through other artists. His music is a delicate blend of musique concrète, electronica, and post-rock (especially in the use of electric guitars). The approach can be likened to Fennesz's circa Endless Summer: letting the tune shimmer in and out of focus under a blanket of fragile sonic pollution. For concrete materials, Honig turns to the everyday life: household sounds, street and subway ambiences, barely heard conversations. This gives the music a resolutely urban feel, yet the sketchy melodies seem to yearn for a more pastoral life. "Broken Marching Band" and "A Brief Visual Pattern" have a strong rhythmic element (and both are pretty good), while the other tracks are more free flowing, the two-part "Material Instrument" marking the abstract end of the album's spectrum. On first listen, Surfaces of a Broken Marching Band sounds like many other post-Endless Summer post-rocking electronica CDs. But it grows on you, and as it does, you start to hear and feel Honig's peculiar take on the genre, his subdued use of field recordings, his artistry.
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10 Total Tracks, 44:44 Total Length
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Credits
- Thomas Hildebrand - Source Material // Thomas Hildebrand - Field Recording // Twerk - Mastering // Mark Templeton - Guitar // Mark Templeton - Guitar // Mark Templeton - Material // Mark Templeton - Material // Ezekiel Honig - Producer // Ezekiel Honig - Producer // Ezekiel Honig - Writer // Ezekiel Honig - Writer // Craig Colorusso - Guitar // Craig Colorusso - Source Material
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