Ghostly Sounds Smeared in Violet

In the past, I have paid homage to the (continual) emergence of sonic hauntologies (and the artist-mediums that may produce them while conducting trance rituals in time).

This may seem airy-fairy to some, but if you actually listen to the sounds of, say, the electronic art duo Twine, you'll see where I'm coming from.

Twine has just released their long-awaited new album Violets on the Ghostly label.

A new review, in the UK's "ever on top of all things audio" Milk Factory, is indicative of what lies ahead, both review-wise and sound-wise for those who make the purchase:

Since, the pair’s complex and emotional mix of glitch, dense atmospherics, reminiscent of 4AD at its haunting peak, and intricate electronic structures adorned with found sounds, has been constantly refined, redefined, and applied on three magnificent albums, released over a three year period, from Circulation (Komplott, 2001), to Recorder (Bip-Hop, 2002) and Twine (Ghostly, 2003). Since, despite being announced for over three years, Violets had remained mysteriously out of Ghostly’s release schedule, until now [...]

[...] Twine revive the vastly emotional and seismic soundscapes of their previous opus and continue to polish a sound which, although deeply reliant on electronics, actually focuses primarily on structural layers of electric guitars treated to various levels. Sounding like the ghost of My Bloody Valentine, stripped of distortions and noise, with its emotional essence and scope intact and laid bare, Twine weave a series of harrowingly beautiful instrumental pieces which they ornate with excerpts of phone conversations, monologues and crowd noises. On Endormie, Cranes singer Alison Shaw is found murmuring in her best French about feeling on the edge of sleep and dreams while ominous clouds of drones, treated guitars and clicks develop in the background [...]

I agree and would add that the album "intuits" future soundtracks for the next wave of art movies made for the net. Of course, I'm biased in that Chad Mossholder (1/2 of Twine) is composing an original soundtrack for my forthcoming mobile phone foreign film, Immobilité.

In a recent interview with Textura, Chad waxes poetic:

Mossholder turned his attention to orchestral composition and became heavily involved in writing music and creating sound design for the video game industry. "I've been collaborating with multi-media artist and author Mark Amerika and am currently scoring his latest feature-length film,” he says. “It's quite an amazing piece of work. Mark's imagery is highly unique and provocative, and the score is very much like Twine music. The end result is an hallucinatory audio-visual experience[...]"

[...]

Mossholder's careful to note, however, that, even if the country's political climate were different, Violets would still probably feel much the same, given how emblematic the work is of Twine's sound: "It's who we are," he says, "it's the sounds we choose to use—are in fact drawn to. I very much believe in Jung's theory of the collective unconscious, especially with regards to creating art. Oftentimes, we channel things into our art and don't realize it until the work is complete. It operates on a sort of surrealist level for me: the concept of convulsive beauty. We are all Maldoror" (a reference to Les Chants de Maldoror, the 19th-century prose poem written by the Comte de Lautreamont that served as a key inspiration to Surrealism-associated figures like Dalí, Artaud, Duchamp, Ray, and Ernst, and to current experimental music artists such as Current 93 and cellist Erik Friedlander).

I just bought my zipped version of the new album here.

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Metadata: Twine, sound art, Mark Amerika, film, exhibition, new media, Violets, mobile phone