a quiet end

Liars ~ No. 1 Against The Rush

Consistently inspired. Adding more of its kin over the next little while…

Process.

(Source: amateurgore)

look at what’s past when the future is near

Several days ago marked one year since the debut EP was released. As with any somewhat-milestone, it’s a good time to look at how far things have come; give the figurative pat-on-the-back while putting up the telescope a little as well.

In the months that followed its release, the EP found its way into a number of hands and more than a few hearts. There was no big splash, but none was needed. Its being welcomed by even a small number of folks and met with enthusiasm in quiet-ish corners was success enough, and an indication that the project has both legs and life. 

BlogTO’s The Neighbourhood Mixtape on ‘Birthplace St.’, the lead track on the EP: “The song unfolds with gleaming chords, vocal fades, and a final-minute flourish that feels as endless as those childhood nights when you wished you could stay up till dawn.”

The EP is still available as a free download over at bandcamp, and can be streamed over there too.

Past Fragments was released this past January and was largely something done as a sort of an experiment/exercise; a series of minimal, atmospheric, instrumental piano pieces, mostly improvised and recorded haphazardly in short bursts over several days. Releasing it was decided after the fact and intended to be a kind of musical footnote more than anything else - very much following the same unplanned logic as its creation. Despite its much less direct nature, it more than quadrupled the first few week’s success of the EP, and has since it has found its way quite literally around the world to hundreds of new listeners in a fairly short amount of time. Past Fragments can be found here.

The instrumental song ‘Whale Bones’ was selected to be featured on the international post-rock/shoegaze/ambient compilation Deploy Your Senses Vol. 1 which was released just this last week. It’s flattering to have been included with so many talented artists from such a multitude of diverse places; it is excellent company to be in.

Deploy Your Senses Vol. 1 is also available for free digitally. Check it out, there are many nuggets to be found. 

Lately it has mostly been on to development for what’s going to come later, but there will be a few new things in the months ahead.

All told it has been a good year. And everything’s grown.

Past Fragments is now available to stream over at CBC Radio 3 & along with the EP, can now be found on Last.fm as well.

The Past Fragments EP is a collection of semi-improvised minimal piano works. Tiny pieces that were conceived around loose melodic ideas or vague notions of ‘character’ and then captured immediately as they were written with little attention paid to production or perfection, in some cases fully extemporized as they were laid down. Recorded over the course of a few days, they imbibed the essence of the moments they emerged from, and are presented here - lo-fi and sparkling - with all of their inherent fragility, ephemera and imperfections intact.

Download it here.

whale bones

Grey dreaming on an windy coast. The sky pulls against itself, clouds creating small vortex’s for as far as can be seen, shifting and churning in counterpoint with the crashing waves. They stretch out tall and long, like the ocean’s own thoughts…but they are not like mine, which always crash back to earth. Plummeting soundlessly and lying in heaps upon an empty beach.

The first track from a forthcoming small collection of semi-improvised piano works. They were conceived loosely as concepts set in a particular key, rhythm, tonal structure or quality, and in some cases just a ‘feeling’, then recorded immediately with little preparation.  

The recordings predate the EP, but have never been released. They are being given slight gloss up and a rearranged running order. It looks like there’ll be at least six pieces included of an original thirteen, possibly more, enough to make up another tiny EP which should be available some time over the next couple of weeks.  

Whale Bones by A Quiet End

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the EP is now free!

Hi everyone,

The ‘A Quiet End’ EP that was released a few months back is now free.

Get it here.

More soon…

A Quiet End: the EP - info roundup

Several weeks ago the moody and texturally rich debut EP from A Quiet End was released. It’s six tracks in length, and is available here via bandcamp for only 2$. You can click on the titles below to listen to the individual songs and read posts on their process and history

 Birthplace St.

(all things always)

Resumption

(…)

Allies

An Intimate History

If you’d like a complementary digital copy please send an email to: aquietend@intimatehistory.com

And of course, please feel free to write the above address if you’d like any information, have a question, or just want to get in touch.  

To the right you can find links to connect via twitter, facebook, and various other networks where a variety different things can be found.

 Much thanks to all for reading/listening. More is on the horizon.   

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The artwork for the digital version of the EP.

birthplace st.

Early on it was decided that ‘Birthplace St.’ would lead off the EP, mostly because it had slightly more immediacy than the others. Despite knowing this, it was referred to simply as ‘three’ for the longest time and spent much of its life without a proper title. The biggest reason for this was that the lyrics were the last to be completed. They didn’t come easily for some reason, and were only fragments for the longest time, none of which I’m completely sure made the final or not. The initial ‘complete’ draft was quite a rushed effort stemming from the need to have finished lyrics to sing when I was pulling together the songs on relatively short notice for a show last summer. ‘Birthplace’ was one I wasn’t so sure about playing, if for no other reason than I felt like I had to force the lyrics to some degree, but with effort I managed to hammer something out I felt serviceable.

Revisiting it later in an effort finalize the lyrics and vocal parts for recording, I ran into the same problem. I didn’t particularly like what was already there, it really seemed forced to me, but it did have something of a theme running through it; something I’d had loosely in my head when rushing out those first words.  It took me a lot of time, rewrites and rewording to get something I was somewhat satisfied with, but even then I wasn’t sure how I felt about the end result, and yet again it’s getting finished had more to do with the imperative of needing to have it done rather than it’s feeling like it was ready. Running with what was already in place, I ended up keeping more of it than I thought I would, even though the slight dissatisfaction hung around the whole time. I said before that there were moments where I would have liked to have spent more time on lyrics in general, but had someone asked me at a certain point, I’d have said these were the ones I was least satisfied with, which is kind of funny considering they were also the ones I spent the most time on.

Looking at them now, it fits, or at least is fitting. ‘Birthplace’ had the intention behind it of pointing forward musically in some fashion, but also ended up thematically touching on the idea of new times generally. In this way it sits alongside ‘An Intimate History’ – which while being the last song considers different times ahead while surveying what has come before – as more future-oriented in its content, and is removed from the more recent past considerings of ‘Allies’ and ‘Resumption’. The first/song last song bookending and how it lines up with the subject matter of each was a fitting synchronistic accident. 

‘Birthplace’ wasn’t so much glancing forward at the rest of the EP that followed, but taking a longer view of what might come later. In this way too, it’s probably the song that most actively pushed the limits of the resources at hand. I’d originally intended it to be a much fuzzier affair overall, but it just didn’t end up that way for whatever reason. The early demos testify to this idea, with piles of overdriven guitars as an early stand-in for what I’d thought to make a gauze-wall of distortion. There was no active decision to not do this, only a sense of it sounding and working better with a different kind of wash. A rising minor scale, more obvious, guitar solo was the only major alteration when further into the recording process, replaced by something I felt was more texturally and compositionally interesting.

Another interesting thing is that ‘Birthplace’ ended up being the only song on the EP that is not in an atypical time signature or alternate tuning. I’m not sure to what degree this helps create the song’s immediacy that sets it apart slightly from the others, but it seems to be the one most people latch onto first, and not because of its position in the running order of the EP. The rest too, wasn’t consciously intended to be ‘less immediate’, or different to force some kind of diversity upon the songs as a group. It was always a question of what worked best, and which things best fit with certain tones and moods. Maybe it is these very differences, and the fact that there are quite a few, that help the whole to function as well as it does. 

A Quiet End - Birthplace St. by aquietend

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Nine Types of Light

Candy’s gonna fall out of the sky.

There’s another song post about the EP on it’s way, but given that this album was released today, I really wanted to throw something related up here as it’s something I’ve been looking forward to for a long time now.

I’d thought to post the video for ‘Will Do’ at some point after it was released a few weeks back, but I’m glad I held off, as what the band is doing here extends much beyond only a single form music video.

The film is described as being “…as much an album as it is a movie by TV on the Radio. The movie is meant to be a visual re-imagining of the record, and includes a music video for every song on the album. The band personally asked their friends and the filmmakers they admired to help direct the music videos. Tunde Adebimpe, the director for the full Nine Types of Light movie, storybooked the music videos together with interviews from local New Yorkers on various topics, including dreams, love, fame and the future.” Right from the incredibly interesting opening dialogue, a framing device for the the film, as well as the album, an astoundingly curious and engaging set of themes begin to emerge. 

Liars, another great band who have some relation with TVOTR, did something similar a few years back with the excellent Drum’s Not Dead, making videos for each song that were released on a DVD along with the album. That record might have had more of an overarching concept in the music than Nine Types of Light does, but the way the film pulls the separate videos together as a unified set of work that adds a structure to the album’s themes and flushes out the depth that lies there more thoroughly, presenting the whole work as a large country worth exploring in detail.

There’s some videos in the works for songs from the EP, and though they are likely a ways off still, I’m hopeful they’ll pan out. There was some early discussion of doing shorts for each song, but it didn’t seem to be a realistic option, however in the future expanding musical ideas into a different mediums that can add further context, or borrow but operate in a separate thematic world, or both, is something I’m very much looking forward to exploring as a more expansive project and collaborative endeavour.

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