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Metroland (July 21, 2005)
Best of the Capital Region, 2005
BEST AMBIENT MUSICIAN: Sara Ayers
Imagine a dark hollow in the woods. Detritus suggests that other people
might have been there recently, and that their intentions might have
been less than wholesome. You suspect they may be returning soon.
The air is thick and humid, and large, unseen insects buzz in the
canopy. You look to the ancient trees, and are struck by their grandeur
and beauty. Then, in the corner of your eye, you see something rushing
at you from the bushes. God will choose to soundtrack this moment
in your life with a Sara Ayers CD..
There are many mp3 files on this page, but due to server space limitations, almost all of them are low-bitrate, 64kps files.
Crystal-clear high-bitrate mp3 and flac file downloads, as well as cover art, are available from musiczeit.com, or you can buy the CDs.
Kyzyl To Samarkand, a 5-song, 51-minute collaboration with Japanese dark ambient experimentalist Ryuta.K. A year in the making, the music is foreboding, ethereal, disturbing, plaintive and dense; diaphanous vocals float over surreal beds of field recordings, molten noise and nervous guitars, evoking the sound of an ominous journey on a pan-Asian silk road.
ONE Golden Warrior Prince of Saka – An uneasy balance between lust and anxiety in the face of the unknowable.
One-minute sample mp3
TWO Invisible Cities – A sonic journey through an imaginary landscape; as time goes by, one sees the world with new eyes.
One-minute sample mp3
THREE Shirley Collins – Dense, dense, dense. A mixture of horror and ecstasy.
One-minute sample mp3
FOUR This Is What I Wanted – Dark and foreboding lyrics about disillusionment and alienation, over a gurgling bed of noise. But a little creepier than that sounds.
One-minute sample mp3
FIVE Kyzyl To Saramkand – Standing at the edge of vast expanse under darkening skies.
One-minute sample mp3
Thrice Thy Heart Shall Broken Be, a 3-song collaboration with vocalist Jeff Sampson, will be
available August 8, 2006 exclusively from Atmoworks. These are the tracks, which you can preview on the Atmoworks website:
ONE Thrice Thy Heart Shall Broken Be – dark chanting, ringing overtones, and ominous vocal washes combine in a sinister yet sparkling atmosphere.
TWO Not Even All The Stars – a plaintive meditation featuring gossamer vocals.
THREE Thrice Thy Heart … (Sleepwalking Mix) – an alternate treatment of the lead track that evolves into a hypnotic and dreamlike journey.
Electricity Is Your Friend is an audio/video compilation recording from 3Pin Recordings, a UK-based label. It includes an exclusive track of mine, Leaving The Land of Before, which you can preview on the 3Pin website. The packaging is exquisite, the mix of artists is eclectic, challenging, ear-cleaning and wonderful.
Click here for composer notes
ONE Adumbratio Mp3 Download
TWO Cruse Mp3 Download
THREE Induration
Mp3 Download
FOUR Cumber Mp3 Download
FIVE Motivity
Mp3 Download SIX Extravasate
Mp3 Download SEVEN Attrahent
Mp3 Download EIGHT Lucida
Mp3 Download
Interiors focuses on vocal soundscapes (voicescapes,
as a friend calls them) evoking thought, emotion and
memory.
ONE Strand of Pearls A dreamy,
elliptical journey into memory.
Mp3 Download
TWO Dark Dark Empty A haiku of
a recurring dream I had as a child, told by spinning,
spiraling voices.
Mp3
Download
THREE But You Can't A spare,
bittersweet meditation.
Mp3 Download
FOUR Blood Music Warm noise
evolving into chaos.
Mp3 Download
FIVE Drowning In Light A
waterfall of silvery voices cascading into a deep,
bittersweet pool.
Mp3 Download
SIX Night Hounds Loneliness has
a familiar sound, and the hounds will come nipping at
your heels.
Mp3 Download
SEVEN There Is No World Outside
Why is everybody driving so fast?
Mp3 Download
EIGHT Klangmoan As the name
implies, enough wailing and clattering to wake the
dead...a fever dream from a very faraway land.
Mp3 Download
NINE Days Go By And one day you
realize it's suddenly several years later...
Mp3 Download
TEN Interiors A surreal,
rushing cascade of voices, constantly shifting focus,
and reality.
Mp3
Download
Figura is a trio of electronic musicians from
Rostov-on-Don, Russia, who created these richly
textured, cross-cultural remixes using my vocal
samples. You can hear more of their exquisite work on their
website.
ONE Falling Silent features
upbeat, percolating percussion and a driving bassline
that propels this piece ever forwards -- music for
train rides.
Mp3
Download
TWO Lachrymatory starts with
hypnotic, rising spirals of trance-inducing washes
followed by an insistent bass line and floating
vocals in an unknown, mysterious language.
Mp3 Download
THREE Nighthounds East meets
West in this cross-cultural gumbo of folk melodies
and synthesizer swirls. This is a small symphony that
changes mood from fast, driving pipes and drums to
slow plaintive spoken word and vocal smears and back
again.
Mp3 Download
FOUR Of The Woods features a
playful piano and angelic vocals, with a fast and
syncopated but slightly melancholy feel.
Mp3 Download
FIVE Winter And The Sound Of Nothing
is down tempo music with an attitude --
fresh-sounding, and just a little spooky.
Mp3 Download
SIX Nico's Dreaming starts with
big washes that fill up your ears like the background
of a painting. Then melodies start appearing all over
the place, floating around each other, lifting you up
until you're floating in the clouds, above the world.
Dark, dreamy, bittersweet and ultimately
transcendent.
Mp3 Download
No pop songs here, no story lines, very few lyrics,
just dense masses of sounds, mostly vocals. It's like
painting with a palette knife, or with a chainsaw.
Music for the right-hand side of your brain, music
for dreaming, music for nightmares.
ONE Winter And The Sound Of Nothing
Everything in a
moment...icestillnessgloatingremorselonelinesssparkle.
Mp3
Download
TWO Sylvatica What I know about
the forest.
Mp3 Download
THREE Starless Black seas,
logarithms, superstitious sailors.
Mp3
Download
FOUR Flight When I was a child,
I loved to spin and spin and spin around until I was
dizzy and fell down. Now I realize it was all
research.
Mp3 Download
FIVE 21 Years Seven vocal
samples, looped to different lengths, play out their
destiny against each other. Inspired in part by Brian
Eno's "2/1," this was the first piece I completed in
this group.
Mp3 Download
SIX Falling Silent (Crushing Mix)
A study of density -- my first Big Guitar
song. It's not silent in the least, but whorling,
dark, circular guitar so dense you can almost mold
the sound in your hands.
Mp3 Download
SEVEN Are You Coming Home?
Crush the bones, burn the body. A collage of
sounds that weave in and around each other, all
relating to a central theme of disenchantment and
alientation. But a little more upbeat than that
sounds.
Mp3 Download
EIGHT Lachrymatory A
lachrymatory is a narrow-necked vessel found in
sepulchers of the ancient Greeks and Romans
containing the tears of the deceased person's
friends. This is the sound of loss.
Mp3
Download
NINE Soundtrack to Angel #3 (Excerpt)
A soundtrack for a sculpture.
See
a video of the sculpture here.
Mp3 Download
TEN Dream of Noise The ecstatic
rush of white noise...
Mp3 Download
TEN Of The Woods
Languidness...this piece always reminds me of
sleeping in the sun.
Mp3 Download
The VOICES Series was originally about building dense
masses of harmonies, but I kept getting bogged down
writing the lyrics that all those voices would sing.
Then I heard The Bulgarian State Television Female
Vocal Choir and realized one of the things I loved
most about them was the fact that I have absolutely
no idea what they're singing about. It forces you to
consider their voices as just instruments working
together, undistracted by content, so that you focus
on the timbre and emotional coloring instead of the
meaning of the lyrics.
As a series of experiments, I began recording vocals
singing nonsense syllables. I also grabbed a bunch of
previously unworkable tracks and played them
backwards, listening to my voice singing now
unrecognizable lyrics. What I ended up with are a
group of vocal sketches that I used to tie the songs
together and lead the listener on an emotional
journey, from premonition to loss to acceptance.
There are traditional "song-like" songs on this CD,
in fact, they comprise the bulk of the music. I
recorded myself playing guitar for the first time and
there are some electronic pieces as well.
ONE I Once Remembered Everything
Full of bewildered regret, capturing a single
moment when I realized that I could no longer
remember the face of someone I had once loved.
Mp3
Download
TWO Voices 9
Mp3 Download
THREE A Man Of Words is based
on a rather gruesome nursery rhyme I found in
Bartlett's Quotations, ending with the refrain,
"you're dead and dead and dead, indeed."
Mp3 Download
FOUR Voices 10
Mp3 Download
FIVE The Choosing Every moment
is a choice.
Mp3 Download
SIX Voices 8
Mp3 Download
sEVEN Every Day We Die A Little
A sound sculpture -- the sound of a memory of
a dream.
Mp3 Download
EIGHT The Waiting Room Living
dangerously and and being very, very lucky.
Mp3 Download
NINE Voices 4
Mp3 Download
TEN Was There Ever Such a Perfect Day?
Mp3 Download
ELEVEN TIME AND TEARS
Mp3 Download
TWELVE The Lighthouse
A stream of consciousness exploration of loneliness
and growing old alone.
Mp3
Download
THIRTEEN Voices 6
Mp3 Download
FOURTEEN Things Change The
world changes in a heartbeat.
Mp3 Download
FIFTEEN Voices 7 The world
changes in a heartbeat.
Mp3 Download
SIXTEEN Voices 2 The world
changes in a heartbeat.
Mp3 Download
SEVENTEEN I Once Remembered Everything
performed by The Reno Brother
Mp3 Download
EIGHTEEN Two Minutes of Silence
NINETEEN In The Air
TWENTY Another Time, Another
Place/Calling You
Collaborations with Mindspawn, a
dark ambient magician.
Fog An atmospheric excursion into the
unseen.
Mp3
Download
Clouds #1 A gorgeous, hopeful, slightly
hallucinagenic view of the clouds that watch over
us.
Mp3 Download
Clouds #2 A dark excusion into a astronomical
nebula.
Mp3 Download
Collaborations with Nebula Drone,
a trio from Cologne, Germany.
Excerpt from EMIL - Live - 03/15/2003
This was a live improvisation that used samples from
Drowning in Light. Here's what Guido Kopp
said "A lot of people told me that they had have a
curious feeling listening to these sounds - we call
it in German Kalt 'den Rücken runterlaufen' --
that means 'a cold shower running down the back.' It
is hard to describe. It was a very emotional
moment."
Mp3 Download
Blood Music Live at the Larkin, April 28,
2002.
Mp3
Download
What is the Past But a Dream of the Future?
In November, 2005, I participated in the Edison Groove XChange at the Schenectady Museum. During this exploration of music and technology, Peter Dilg recorded my music on wax cylinder. The following track is (keep up with me here...) an mp3 of a CD track of a digital recording of a wax recording of me singing live and processing my vocals through a laptop and a PA. Check out the noise made by that rotating cylinder.
Mp3 Download
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