Endlings
The seeds that germinated between Endlings - a long-running musical collaboration between John Dieterich and Pulitzer Prize winner Raven Chacon - and the Vancouver New Music Circle extends back the Summer and Fall of 2020 and has resulted not only in an album of new work but a fully interactive online instrument presented as a website. More than a website, the project is described as a “shared folder, many folders, an anonymous process, a translation device, a score, a text, a sound, more sounds, words ,many scores ,a multiplier, an exercise in collaboration, a bridge, a mixer, an index, a list, room with rooms in it, a journey or a trip, an album to be.” The creation of the album and the website, "took place on the internet,on many screens, between email threads, in Albuquerque,and on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, səl̓ílwətaʔɬ q̓ic̓əy̓, q̓ʷɑ:n̓ƛ̓ən̓ and Semiahma First Nations.”
This album is a tangible and resonating trace of the creative work and interactions that have been developing and growing among all the artists involved in Vancouver New Music's PARALLEL 03 over a few months of collective work, dialogues, creations, discoveries and exchange in the Summer and Fall of 2020. In its labyrinthine nature the magic PARALLEL 03 website further complements and reveals the richness and powerful interconnections of this ongoing process. The album features the work of Parmela Attariwala, Adrian Avendaño, John Brennan, Elisa Ferrari, Marina Hasselberg, Alanna Ho, Steve Chow and Joel Schuman.
As an album, PARALLEL 03 is nurtured by many things: abstraction, analogy, beauty, brainstorming, intuition, tension, divergent thinking, questions, improvisation, noise, anxiety, diversity, magical thinking, playfulness, ambiguity, serendipity, storytelling, experiment and the power of imagination ...
...dispersion, infiltration, osmosis,
adoption, abstraction, contagion ...
music here finally aspires to the dimension of scent.
Musical communication only exists
on a purely emotional level.
Emotionality is immanent,
expression is definitely linked to the instant,
instant is unpredictably transcendent.
The labyrinthine and multi-dimensional nature of this project and this space has been inspired by imagination and perplexities, meandering, translations, sonic and silent utterances while discovering the ephemeral poetry hidden everywhere, ...fragments used to define an ongoing and endless process in which we wander on the verge of discovering ( ...or revealing) ourselves. Fragments of form: perhaps the only possible form.
Here we won't find a single, indisputable centre, here a different kind of Harmonia, questions and awe, make everything equally important and equally unimportant. Here we blur invention and imagination, while they both give themselves to our perceptions in their multi-form and magical nature, while they act with full agency and are not acted upon. Invention and imagination here are not related to expression, as their very nature is purely symbolic: like cloudiness is not just about clouds. While looking at and immersing ourselves in these clouds we open to vast horizons while resonating with creative energy and poetics of engagement.
Finally, a poetic vision emerges here within qualities and behaviours essential to any practice of freedom; to any healthy relationship among people and communities and within the biosphere we live in, the magic beauty of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.
Endlings | Human Form
Endlings is a duo comprised of Deerhoof guitarist John Dieterich and composer and artist Raven Chacon. On Human Form, the duo expand upon the haunted abstraction of their 2017 self-titled debut. Four years on, Human Form offers a distillation of a collaborative and improvisatory relationship that began with a performance 10 years ago at the Albuquerque Experimental Music Festival. On Human Form, they are joined on three songs by virtuoso percussionist Marshall Trammell and Iranian artist Babak Shahsiah provided cover art for the LP.
Human Form moves from short-wave music box transmissions piped in from The Overlook’s Grand Ballroom (“In Us Confide,”), to tension-filled percussive tracks (“Pre-Bird,” “Indictor”), to ambitious long-form compositions that seem to be interpolating between multiple grooves while simultaneously building up and breaking down brackish melodies, surging drones and crushing electronics with laser-guided intensity (“Save and Hold Fantasy Threats,” “Primordial Forms”). Scattered throughout are moments of heavily weighted beauty that permeate the record, from the sun-lit microtonal ascendance of “Cither” to the joyful cacophony of “Frágil”.
There is a pervasive sense of awe and reverence for the music Chacon and Dieterich are cultivating on Human Form. These sounds, created by two veteran noise-makers and collaborators, have a way of attaching themselves to you long after the needle has lifted – a ghostly aura refracted in sunlight, revealing impossible yet immediately recognizable worlds.
Raven Chacon is a Berlin Prize winning Diné composer, visual and sound artist and Southwest noise legend. Chacon has collaborated with the Kronos Quartet, Laura Ortman and many more. John Dieterich is a guitarist, composer and producer based in Albuquerque, NM. He plays in the band Deerhoof and collaborates on a variety of musical and artistic projects.
Endlings is the collaborative music project between pulitzer prize winning musician Raven Chacon and Deerhoof guitarist John Dieterich. The two create broken and beautiful sounds that push both artists squarely out of their comfort zone.
The latest LP on Whited Sepulchre Records features a collaboration with Vancouver New Music. The seeds that germinated between Endlings - a long-running musical collaboration between John Dieterich and Pulitzer Prize winner Raven Chacon - and the Vancouver New Music Circle extends back the Summer and Fall of 2020 and has resulted not only in an album of new work but a fully interactive online instrument presented as a website. More than a website, the project is described as a “shared folder, many folders, an anonymous process, a translation device, a score, a text, a sound, more sounds, words ,many scores ,a multiplier, an exercise in collaboration, a bridge, a mixer, an index, a list, room with rooms in it, a journey or a trip, an album to be.” The creation of the album and the website, "took place on the internet,on many screens, between email threads, in Albuquerque,and on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, səl̓ílwətaʔɬ q̓ic̓əy̓, q̓ʷɑ:n̓ƛ̓ən̓ and Semiahma First Nations.”
Parallel 03 is a tangible and resonating trace of the creative work and interactions that have been developing and growing among all the artists involved in Vancouver New Music's PARALLEL 03 over a few months of collective work, dialogues, creations, discoveries and exchange in the Summer and Fall of 2020. In its labyrinthine nature the magic PARALLEL 03 website further complements and reveals the richness and powerful interconnections of this ongoing process. The album features the work of Parmela Attariwala, Adrian Avendaño, John Brennan, Elisa Ferrari, Marina Hasselberg, Alanna Ho, Steve Chow and Joel Schuman.