Label: Room40

元々はデュオ・プロジェクトとしてスタート、2009年からはWill Longのソロ・プロジェクトとなり現在までに関連作含め300以上のタイトルを出版しているCeler。当時のパートナーであったDanielle Baquet-Longと共に2009年に録音した初期タイトル[Poulaine]が、17年の時を経てRoom40より初再発。当時カリフォルニア大学アーバイン校より依頼を受け14世紀の写本13点の展覧会の為に制作した音源で、シームレスな持続音作品でありながらも写本に対応する13の異なる録音で構成したもの。バイオリン、チェロ、テルミン、環境音のミックスがゆっくりと変容する興味深い時間感覚。







When you’re creating something loosely referred to as “art” with another person, you’re mining the depths of minds and experience, searching connections with pasts, each of us producing from a different place. Communication exists as unspoken and simultaneous, more carnal than collaborative, and dwelling rather than saying. We all miss that, wrapped up fantasies of perfectness and lovesick doves. Youth, how fleeting and naive.

"Created by commission for the University of California at Irvine as a sound companion for an exhibition of 13 different 14th Century manuscripts. The original pieces existed as 13 different parts for each individual piece of art." Or so the origins of the original release in 2009 on Students of Decay state.

What seemed real was a myriad liquor haze, fabrication, or imagination. Embellishment is equivalent to invention, and that moment when you can’t tell the difference between dreams or reality (I surely can’t remember which is which now) is important - and must be noted. I remember pouring over 14th century art, utilizing unauthorized library passes, and being witness to the trajectories of two individuals on divergent but somehow-crossing timelines. Originally recorded in 2007-2009 (?) by Danielle Baquet and Will Long, with backpacked gear, garage photography, sleepless nights and skipped work. I brought the tape and made the loops, she brought the laptop and the pen and paper.

Try to look at it like this. Recorded in stereo, then split into two tracks for each left and right channel, reversing one side and adding reverse reverb, and the other long reverb and then reversing. Making each stereo again, then putting back together and blending each left and right together to make a stereo track again. This was an age of hybrid experiments between analog tape loops and digital processing, to render a new path, for better or worse. Somehow this correlated with a pad of scribbled poetry - whether original or quoted (one can never tell), a few random phone numbers, and the omnipresence of long-toed shoes in the 14th century paintings. “How befitting, like Georgia O’Keefe’s flowers.”

What all comes down to is this - that sometimes those paths of yours and theirs cross for a time - and only for a time, and in that time, you’re there in that same place. It doesn’t mean that you know the other person, or that you ever will. But maybe, just maybe, you’ll be looking for the same thing at that moment, and that’s what you’ve shared, in many different ways, in different directions; backwards, equivocally.