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Retrieval is the debut collaborative album from Faith Coloccia and Alex Barnett. Artist and composer Coloccia was a founding member of Everlovely Lightningheart, and is perhaps best known as one half of Mamiffer. She has contributed to recordings by House Of Low Culture, Boris and William Fowler Collins among others, and collaborations with Circle and Daniel Menche are forthcoming.Visit product page →
Alex Barnett played in Oakeater but since 2009 has been active primarily as a solo artist, with releases on Catholic Tapes, DRAFT, Nihilist and others.
Following an initial exchange of ideas, the bulk of Retrieval was recorded over three intensive days at Otic Sound in Vancouver, with Coloccia contributing treated vocals, tape-manipulated acoustic recordings and AM radio sounds, and Barnett adding an array of synth instruments to create further loops, drum sounds and other rhythmic elements.They then reconvened at AVAST! studio in Seattle for a final session of mixing and editing with engineer/producer Randall Dunn.
The resulting LP is about time and place, synthesis and environment. It's an invitation into the woods, to find that which reveals itself only to the lost. A grave, deeply introspective work, pastoral in essence but cosmic in scope.
Opening with the stately, medievalist sequences of 'Harbor', Retrieval's narrative takes in subdued techno abstraction ('Hallway'), chrondritic psychedelia ('So, How Much Do You Know About Me?'), saw mill gear-grind ('Repeating Pit') and eldritch noise invocations ('Retrieval', 'Bird's Eye'). Throughout, it invigorates without consoling.
Tracklisting:
1. Harbor
2. Switch
3. So, How Much Do You Know About Me?
4. Hallway
5. Repeating Pit
6. Retrieval
7. Birds Eye -
Sold outFaith Coloccia and Alex Barnett return to Blackest Ever Black with their second duo album, Weld; working with synthesizers, affected vocals, raw electrical noise, field recordings, EVP techniques, tape manipulation and drum machines to create a music at once lucid and mystic. Its songs embody various experiential philosophies and objectives: searching for the sacred in the forgotten and supposedly useless; exploring the meaning of 'natural'; listening for the pulse of the ancient; using technology both to materialise memory and to dream a folklore for a future age.Visit product page →
Coloccia and Barnett's ambition is apparent early on in the stately, medievalist keyboard/choral poetics of Truth Teller', moving through the agitated wormhole techno of Dreamsnake', to the white light-emitting, near-symphonic plainchant of Healer'. Blight''s zero-hour synth pulsations are first interrupted, then engulfed, by an extra-terrestrial broadcast of piercing bell and glass-tones; AM Horizon'is pitched bewitchingly between Prophet-5 pulp futurism and earthbound, atavistic dread; Agate Cross''s baroque harmonic sequence disintegrates at its very climax, cooling and dissipating into a deep starfield of pure tone.
Ash Grove'and Rose Eye'are exhilarating exercises in contemporary musique concrète: complex timbral constructs in which Coloccia's disembodied glossolalia, swooping strings and other nameless sonic spectra conspire to evoke extra-dimensional space and the highest spiritual drama.
Weld speaks its own distinctive dream-language, but we would certainly recommend it to anyone enamoured of the brittle sci-fi synth-scapes in Caroline K's Now Wait For Last Year, the amorphous electronics of Beatriz Ferreyra's recent work, Conrad Schnitzler's more gothic moments, and even the gravest metaphysical reckonings of a Stockhausen or a Rozmann.
Tracklisting:
1. Truth Teller
2. Dreamsnake
3. Healer
4. Blight
5. AM Horizon
6. Rose Eye
7. Agate Cross
8. Ash Grove
