MYSTERY SEA 13 | Ellende | [The abc of drowning]

ARTWORK

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INTRODUCTORY WORDS

- " ...Music is not in visible space, but it besieges, undermines and displaces that space, so that soon these overdressed listeners who take a judicial air and exchange remarks or smiles, unaware that the floor is trembling beneath their feet, are like ship's crew buffered about on the surface of a tempestuous sea. The two spaces are distinguishable only against the background of a common world, and can compete with each other only because they both lay claim to total being. They are united at the very moment they clash..."

- M. Merleau-Ponty
, Phenomenology of perception, Routledge, London 1994 (p. 225)

PRESS RELEASE

ELLENDE is a mysterious outfit based around an organization diagram where a few core founder members (one is dutch & currently lives in Tokyo) format works they receive from other anonymous participants, or sculpt new pieces from a large stock of archived material...
There's a sort of ritual aspect to the process which pays also homage to deceased members...
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ELLENDE is thus a strange schizophrenic hydra who quickly flooded the experimental scene with an host of intriguing psychoactive releases...
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For their MS hypnotic composition, 2 of the core members actually played physically together which clearly contributed to give it an increased aura of presence...
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"The abc of drowning" is a downward spiralling suction, a gradual fading into the trails of an inescapable vortex...
an experience of self-loss & perceptual retuning...
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Below the surface, faint sounds ricochet becoming a string of fecund modulations... leading us to an undefined border of sensory disorientation...
As we go along, time freezes, mental images recombine themselves randomly, all linearity is denatured...
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This is a drift beyond landmarks, an amniotic reconditioning...

TRACKS

01. The a > listen !
02. The b
03. The abc > listen !

LENGTH

69'52

REVIEWS

MANIFOLD|Vince Harrigan
The ABC of Drowning is the first I've seen from Ellende that's not in a black and white motif. I like those a lot, the singular idea that rules the motif seems to inform the intent. But that after all is only the cover art. The sound in this one is probably closer to extreme drift than any previous Ellende work and it grabs you right off the bat. Tones and strains have the slight hint of dark sentimentality, a glancing back, a shuddering attempt to remember. The requisite weirdness is still there; the hidden voices, the illogical turns and creeping hallucinations. Nothing is as it seems in an Ellende work. this is strangeness for those who are used to the strange. An hour and nine minutes of blissful oddity.
manifold

MICROVIEW v16|TJ Norris
Rated : 3 out of 5
The ABC of Drowning was recorded randomly over the course of sixteen years. It features something of a light-speed tunnel ride of partial sound surrounding you, and then it dissipates and repeats again. Like other records in their wake this is quite the oblique ride into a haunted void. Along the way what illustrates this are a series of bloated background reverberations that sound like repeated nightmares of ancient Rome and/or large creatures that no longer inhabit our planet. How can one record have so many disparate parallels without compromising its integrity? ‘The ABC of Drowning’ works more like a history book of sorts, with only a hinted glint of what was, and simply shapes the memories out of fragments. What the listener gets is an aerated version, quite filtered down from its original context. So it’s more like a digitized image from a photocopy than a page from any actual history. But its all done with the sleight of hand by way of a mystical cascade of sound effects that create their own atmosphere, one that billows with winds, shades light and otherwise keeps a heavy overcoat on at all times.
microview

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