For the second installment of Long Distance Marc Manning (Heavy Lids) teams up with Yann Novak for and improvised session of guitar and laptop. The result is a beautiful and heartfelt drone, bordering on noise in the mellowest and most meditative sense of the word.
Track Listing
- oh inevitable datum
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An outstandingly well-disciplined improvisation on guitar and laptop from Yann Novak and guitarist Marc Manning (aka Heavy Lids) focusing on infinitesimally shifting, overlapping tones and a careful flirtation with noise signals. There’s a slow, melancholy quality to all this that lends a certain emotive undercurrent to the music, but after a quivering mid-section that threatens to disintegrate into high frequency static at any moment, the duo revert to a laudably pensive final section full of stillness, austerity and steady-handed anti-climax. Excellent.
– BoomkatDragon´s Eye Recordings is a label that seems to put as much thought and care into the packaging of its music as into the music itself. And why not? While you cannot tell the proverbial book from its cover, it is in fact the cover that the music will be spending most of its life in, either on your shelf or in your hand. Why shouldn´t it be as attractive as possible? Each release, regardless of size, is an appealingly austere masterpiece.The label is run out of Seattle by Yann Novak and has previously showcased two tiny, perfect pieces of collaborative experimental ambient on three-inch CDRs (a third volume has yet to be released since the right packaging has still to be decided upon) under the collective rubrik “Long Distance”. The first is reputed to be a collaboration between Novak and Eno On (whom I presume is from the land of Erewhon). This is an eminently minimal, spacey investigation of, well, space, with pulsars of analogue-sounding synth resonating into deep emptiness, like signals being sent out there at random and sometimes, improbably, being answered.The second (or first actual) collaboration involves the talents of Marc Manning (aka Heavy Lids) from nearby Portland. This short work is similarly minimal, a slow, remorseless trek across nearly featureless geography. An absolutely gorgeous whisper and hum flecked with small incidents in sound, stretched out over exactly twenty minutes.
– SonomuFor the second instalment of Long Distance, Yann Novak teams up with guitarest Marc Manning (aka Heavy Lids) for a sequence of long shimmers on guitar and laptop. It’s not easy to resist reference to Fripp and Eno’s startling 70s collaborations, but there is a stillness here that defies easy comparison. The knob twiddling is slow and lugurious, the blend of insturments almost seamless. The drones seem to float in the air, shifting angles so we can observe them more easily. Beautiful stuff.
– The Wire