Traversing through aural soundscapes populated by quasar hums, insinuating melodic lines, hypnotic guitar arpeggios and well-oiled machinery, Gerard's latest is a sonic exploration into the realm of supernatural probabilities.

6 MP3 Songs
ELECTRONIC: Ambient, ELECTRONIC: Soundscapes

Details:
"Filigree and Shadow" is a concept album, much like 2005's "Ambientism", and yet so much has evolved in my approach to music composition in that short time frame. Automatic writing has always been a mainstay for me creatively, though nowhere as consistently as on this recording. The cornerstone of this album is my homage to Eberhard Schoener, "Kinesiology." Way back in the early 80's, I heard Schoener's work on a NPR program: the track "Falling In Trance" was unlike anything I'd heard in electronic music up to that point - I was further astounded to discover that the intriguing guitar filigrees were the handiwork of The Police's Andy Summers. Within days of hearing that program, I went to St. Mark's Sounds in the East Village of Manhattan, and picked up the import-only copy of "Trance-Formation", which I still turn to from time to time for inspiration and creative mind-expansion. It wasn't clear to me that "Kinesiology" was a Schoener homage until I began working on the track mastering, when suddenly it became staggeringly apparent. In many respects "Filigree and Shadow" is more experimental than past instrumental albums of mine, insofar as a lot of rhythmic/percussive ideas made their way into the music: usually, unless I'm specifically writing something percussive (ie: the "Variegaged Marimbas" series) my electronic work is "beat and rhythm free", such as the music on the Elysium ensemble project "First Light." But here, on compositions "As Angels Annunciate" and "Inertia Reel" one almost gets the feeling I attempted field recordings inside various industrial plants, then fed the results through signal processing. I also allowed guitars to take a more prominent role in the recording process, sometimes utilizing guitar voicings to articulate what would in the past be colored by various sequencer patterns. The closer "Secondhand Daylight" bookends "Kinesiology" in terms of complexity and mood - and yes, I appropriated the title from the second LP by the post-punk quintet Magazine. Interestingly enough, what fans and critics find notable about the second Magazine album is that the music is predominated by the haunting keyboard textures of Dave Formula in a way no Magazine album had been before or since - it painted an ethereal, desolate yet capitvating sonic landscape. Do I mean to suggest that "Filigree and Shadow" is a similarly dark ride? That perception is strictly in the eye (or ear) of the beholder.

David Gerard
Winter 2008

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