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Loren Chasse alrady had a prolific career with
Id Battery (a collaboration with Brandon LaBelle), that yielded the albums
Unique (Ancient Tavern Ecstatic Yod, 1997), that documents a live 1995 improvisation featuring Chasse on drums and Labelle on bass (rather amateurish and atonal),
Lily Events (Unique Ancient Tavern, 1997),
Last Blue Before Black (Unique Ancient Tavern, 1998),
and Inferno From An Occult Diary (S.I.W.A., 1999), dedicated to Swedish
writer August Strindberg.
The later albums are cauldrons of concrete, ambient and industrial pieces.
The dynamics
is rather random, and the timbres become characters in a theatre of the absurd.
His ideas of "the microphone as an extended ear" are best expressed in
ambient minimalist works that mix manipulated found sounds and electronic
sounds simulating natural sounds:
Siphon Glimmers (Unique Ancient Tavern, 1997),
Exfolia Motors (Unique Ancient Tavern, 2000),
Synthesis of Neglected Places (Unique Ancient Tavern, 2001),
Coelacanth (Blessed cursed, 2001), a duo with Jim Haynes (theoretician
of "the poetics of decay"),
Fantasy Apparition (S'agitarecordings, 2002).
Chasse launched his solo career in the realm of digital glitch music
(plus fire, surf, wind and trees)
with Hedge Of Nerves (Anomalous, 2002).
They basically document sound sculptures
of musique concrete and interactive electronic/digital music.
Chasse is mainly known as one fourth of
the improvisational group Thuja, which he founded with
Smith and Donaldson of Mirza
and pianist Rob Reger.
Blithe Sons is the duo of Loren Chasse and Mirza's guitarist Glenn Donaldson, who have released the CDROMs
Dirt And Clouds (Jewelled Antler, 2000), which was equal parts studio recordings and field recordings, and Waves Of Grass (Jewelled Antler, 2001), which blended field and studio sounds.
Also recorded "in the fields" was We Walk The Young Earth (Family Vineyard, 2003), their third and most ornate album, featuring an impressive orchestration of guitar, harp, harmonium, wind chimes, cymbals, gongs, keyboards, banjo, and found sounds. The result is, nonetheless, humble and subdued, recalling the most spaced-out psychedelia of the 1960s.
The chants of The Book of Names and All Children's Faces Looking Upwards hark back to ancestral pastoral folk music, while
Green Patterns adds a sinister mood, and
The Oldest Living Things (18 minutes) creates a rainbow of emotions.
Green Mansions (Jewelled Antler, 2003) was even "played" by animals
attracted to the stringed instruments by food.
Field recordings around the San Francisco seashore constitute the center of
mass of
Arm Of The Starfish (Family Vineyard, 2004).
After a four-year hiatus, Blithe Sons reunited and released
The Great Orthochromatic Wheel (Family Vineyard, 2008).
Of, another Chasse project, debuted with the "instrumental" album
The Infant Paths (Jewelled Antler, 2003),
that processed/mixed natural sounds and live instrumental improvisations
by Chasse himself. It was followed by
The Quartz Pond (Jewelled Antler, 2004) and
The Buried Stream (Jewelled Antler, 2005), again weaving
together field recordings and live instruments.
Coelacanth's The Glass Sponge (23five, 2003) collects
four lengthy ambient droning/hissing pieces from various live
performances.
Coelacanth's Mud Wall (The Helen Scarsdale Agency, 2004) finds Chasse
and Jim Haynes improvising with rock, rust, wind, water, metal, etc.
Wrack Light In Copper Ruin (Seal Pool, 2006) was a collaboration with
multimedia artist Keith Evans and with Matmos.
Chasse's pastoral solo
The Air In The Sand (Naturestrip, 2005)
was the ideal follow-up to Hedge Of Nerves.
The Moon Is Down (Jewelled Antler, 2006) and
Noctilucent Valleys (Soft Abuse, 2007) were credited to Ov, meaning
a (dreamy) collaboration with his wife Christine Chasse.
The four pieces on
Of's' The Sun And Earth Together (Ultra Hard Gel, 2008) rank among
his most organic and magical works.
Rocks Will Open/ Morphological Echo (Digitalis, 2008) collects
Of recordings from 2005 and 2007.
The Otolith (The Helen Scarsdale Agency, 2008) was a collaboration
between Chasse and Michael Northam.
The Footpath (Naturestrip, 2008) was another meditation on field recordings, this time focusing on beach sounds of waves and wind.
The Child Readers is a collaboration between Loren Chasse (field recordings) and Jason Honea (falsetto, acoustic guitar, folk lullabies)
that released Dark Laughter (Jewelled Antler, 2003) ,
Memory and Fantasy (Mallard Lake, 2004) and
Music Heard Far Off (Soft Abuse, 2008).
Loren Chasse is also active in the Franciscan Hobbies and the Knit Separates.
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