Keith Berry Sound Artist

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Elevator Bath's ongoing series of picture disc LPs (each record being adorned with full-color artwork by the recording artist) continues with Keith Berry's debut appearance on vinyl: An absolutely mesmerizing cycle of deep, meditative tranquility inextricably linked to Berry's otherworldly painting which appears behind the record's grooves.

The soundscapes along The Cartesian Plane are beautifully absorbing, heavy with the slow unraveling of emotions, almost beyond belief. There is an immense weight to these recordings, the richness of which belies the careful subtlety of the compositions. The sound is expansive and unreal, a perfect complement to the record's visual aspects which seem to describe a kind of alternate existence. Like bookends, the colorful images house a wealth of experiences, wonderful and frightening. As you gaze upon the rotating colors and Keith Berry's dense dream-sounds pour out of the speakers, total immersion in The Cartesian Plane is more than probable, it is certain.

Five years have passed since Keith Berry's masterful The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish, a disc that was something of a revelation for the lucky few who were able to obtain a copy of the original release. Since that time Berry's reputation has steadily grown, even though his discography has not. Aside from a few compilation appearances (including Elevator Bath's A Cleansing Ascension), he has remained silent. The release of The Cartesian Plane then truly calls for celebration, as it is precisely the record those of us who admire Berry's work have longed for.

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On the occasion of Elevator Bath's 10-year anniversary, the label has issued its first compilation release. This 73-minute compact disc is not a retrospective but is instead a collection of (almost) entirely exclusive material from 10 artists currently involved with Elevator Bath.

A Cleansing Ascension includes previously unreleased recordings from: Matt Shoemaker, Adam Pacione, Jim Haynes, Keith Berry, Rick Reed, Dale Lloyd, Colin Andrew Sheffield, James Eck Rippie, and Tom Recchion.

This is the ideal introduction to the label, offering a particularly cohesive yet varied selection of works from some of the brightest names in the experimental music community. Uneasy narrative, warm ambience, rusted drones, sine waves, field recordings, meditative composition, plus a glorious photograph on the inner sleeve (taken by Colin's father in 1971) can all be found in this single, beautiful package. Elevator Bath = A Cleansing Ascension.

elevator bath Colin Andrew Sheffield

Basilica is Rameses III´s eagerly anticipated follow-up totheir acclaimed release Honey Rose (Important), Basilica is a double album of live recordings of new Rameses material accompanied by re-interpretations of those same recordings by contemporaries Robert Horton, Keith Berry, Gregg Kowalsky and Astral Social Club.

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Each artist approached to contribute to the Basilica disc was given free range to experiment with the live files, to re-invent and re-interpret the recordings as they saw fit.

Minimalist sound-sculptor Keith Berry rolled out the slow-motion waterfalls of Basilica and gave the album an early focus and provided inspiration for the glacial artwork.

Gregg Kowalsky played the Rose Blood remix as part of his own performance at the OVERLAP 02 event in San Francisco using its tuned sinewave oscillators, cassette tapes and loops to induce, to quote the man himself, "a psychoacoustic listening experience".

Our subtle textures were pushed way into the red when noise veteran Neil Campbell sandblasted the original tracks into the howling mirror of Astral Social Club. His Tigers In The Snake Pit was remixed live in the very same venue in which it was originally performed and finessed with some post-performance layering.

And Robert Horton was open-minded and kind enough to allow Rameses III to remix his remix, leading to the gentle trumpet curlicues and electronic birdsong entwining the original drone of After The Red Rose.

Although Basilica was originally envisioned as a single disc album, once the remixes were complete it slowly became evident that they should be paired with a disc of live recordings in order to put the Basilica disc into context. In contrast to the heavily-produced and painstakingly-constructed Rameses studio albums, all five of the previously-unreleased tracks on the Origins disc were recorded directly to stereo at various venues around London. As such, they fully represent those moments in performance where the trio strive to make the most beautiful music they can.

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This is the second of a proposed trilogy of projects pertaining to film directors - the first one was for Andrei Tarkovsky. This second release turns its focus upon Yasujiro Ozu's use of "pillow shots" (i.e. short poetic pauses that appear between the acting segments of his films. The term "pillow shot" was not coined by Ozu himself, but several years after his passing in the early 1960s by a Japanese journalist who was trying to draw a comparison of the intermediate scenes to "pillow words" found in traditional Japanese poetry. This is a double CD release with both CDs featuring audio plus a cross-platform compatible PDF booklet containing pillow shots (courtesy of Criterion Collection) and liner notes.

Each artist who appears on this release was asked to choose one or more "pillow shots" to use as inspiration for their pieces. A link to web pages containing a large assortment of pillow shots" was provided, and accordingly, the pillow shots were reserved on a first come, first served basis. The artists also watched the films from which the pillow shots came from in order to get a sense of how their chosen pillow shots were employed by Ozu.

The sound work featured represents a wide range of artistic approaches, but as always with these projects, the artists were chosen specifically, based on their previous work and on how it might contribute to the collective whole of each project.