Spandrels Sessions Vol. 1: Unconscious Transmissions From The Manzano Mountains

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 2017-04-27

Label: Not On Label

Cassette housed in a 3D printed crystal. Limited to 20 copies, all white, or all black.

This is a meditation mix of ambient recordings; it’s meant to be heard with patience. It’s a mix for your body, not for your mind. This meditative music is meant to draw you into our secret world and move you through it.

During the writing and recording process of Total Time, as we harboured away in the Manzano Mountains of the high desert in New Mexico, we began each writing session with a series of meditative and ecstatic exercises and rituals. Then we would come to our instruments and record stream-of-consciousness musical impulses that were meant to capture our most earnest and direct expressions unaffected by arrangement and the end goal of a "song". At times, we were snowed under for days, at others, we were drowned out by the loud roars of the gusting desert winds. At night we were enchanted and put under spells by the magic of the night sky. And all these changes in the environment and its effects on us were documented and recorded in these "excess" sound experiments.

The music contained within represents the ideas and ritualized musical explorations that ultimately led to the songs on Total Time. They're not at all similar though. This material stands on its own as something separate, but maybe, with close listening, small elements of Total Time can be heard. If Total Time, as an album, is a living, breathing body, then this collection of music is its consciousness.

Spandrels are the pleasant by-product of a design or creation. In architecture, spandrels are the small triangular gaps between round archways and the rectangular frames into which they're built. In biology, the term applies to secondary byproducts of evolutionary adaptations.