sd-002: christopher mcfall - the city of almost

8.2008
cd limited to 500 copies

north america $11

international $12

In retrospect, these recordings generate a sense of tremendous nostalgia for me and I consider them to be my most 'musical' works to date.  When I began writing these works I had just moved into a new studio building off of Troost Avenue in Kansas City; the studio that I work in currently.  This area was once a pinnacle of prosperity for Kansas City, as it's avenues were rife with commerce and business.  Over the decades this sector of the city has since dimished and fallen into ruin, and it's rusting buildings and eroded sidewalks proclaim themselves as a testament to what was and what now may be defined as a 'city of almost.'
 
Thanks to:  H. Stewart, Juan Jose Calarco, Asher and God.
(text by Christopher McFall)

i have been listening to the work of christopher mcfall for nearly three years now and i am still somewhat at a loss when trying to describe it. he seems to work with location recordings in a way which is as much about recording as it is about locations; in fact the locations which the recordings describe are entirely suspect, more a construction than a description. to my ears, christopher is a designer of sound works which are as compelling as they are confounding and through his combining of digital manipulation with physical manipulation, he creates vibrant juxtapositions of concrete sounds with sonic materials which are entirely alien.  all of this is to say that i find his works fascinating, and not least for the questions they raise about methodologies of sound design and the transformation of discrete recorded data into a rich web of reference and allusion.

for the album at hand christopher has used recordings of his local landscape of downtown kansas city as well as recordings of an old, found record collection on its owners broken turntable. there is a sense of nostalgia and deterioration, both metaphorical and physical which is palpable in the recordings. the layers of time and the layers of texture both point towards a portrait of our past and our present; a world which is pushing ever forward, while the problems of today and yesterday lay waste in the periphery, constantly edging in on our senses of security and beauty.
(text by asher thal-nir)

sd-001: graceful degradation: variations

2.2008
cd limited to 500 copies

north america $11

international $12

featuring: heribert friedl, john hudak, jason kahn, kenneth kirschner, steve roden, steinbrüchel and ubeboet.

the source recording for the compositions featured on this album still exist on a single 90 minute cassette, made by the intermagnetics corporation from santa monica, california. there are still some bits of led zeppelin here and there among my recordings which haven't been recorded over, but mostly the tape is full of recording i made. i remember working with this tape for several months over the summer and into fall of 2005, in my apartment in brooklyn; i would spend hours going through the material and trying to find different combinations of the recordings of the sounds which are stored on it. after a certain period of time working with the material i put together some pieces for an album release and thought i was done. but in the end i went back and continued working, it is the material from this second period of work which has been used by the artists featured on this release.
the concept of graceful degradation in relation to memory as well as system failure, seemed quite fitting to the work i was doing, as well as to the work of other sound recording artists. there is a relationship that develops between our own memories and recordings made and archived using various data storage and retrieval technologies which i am very interested in; i initiated this project with this interest in mind.
as a continuation of the graceful degradation of my original recordings i asked seven artists to use the material in their own ways to create a new piece. each artist put the material into their systems of working with sound and came up with the results featured on this album. i am very honored to have their contributions and pleased to present them on this first release on sourdine.
(text by asher thal-nir)