Orphax

Two long drone pieces based on improvised saxophone by James Fella and Jozef van Erve. One intense mind-melting business. Saxophone Studies is an album that took multiple years to form. Already in 2006 I asked friends and other musicians if they could send me audio files to make music out of this. This music never really happened, but one of the files I received was some saxophone recordings by James Fella (Soft Shoulder / Gilgongo Records). In 2017 while browsing my computer for audio files I came across this recording and finally took it up to create work from this.
Straight from diving in these recordings I had a clear goal for these recordings. The result is a 17 minute long piercing drone work where due to the use of multi-layering and rough cutting a psychedelic effect takes place. The "non-harmonic multitones" collide with each other in the room but also your ears to create a mesmerizing mind fuck.

After this track was finished I was eager to create a second piece for saxophone, and I was really happy for this to work with my father. So late December 2017 I brought my recording equipment to my parents where my father played his various saxophones for me. In this work, which is very bass heavy, I worked with all different saxophone sounds but the focus lies on the baritone. Again with multi-layering and here also phasing of the sounds a slow evolving piece grows and grows. Other than the first piece here I wanted to create a more relaxed listening experience, though still when you dive into the details strange patterns appear with beating sounds, from which in the end the melodic parts of the saxophone slowly emerge.

For this album I want to thank James and Jozef for their contributions, Rutger Zuydervelt for the help with the artwork and Jos Smolders for the mastering and advice, and the dear people from Monotype Pressings for the help in making this happen.
It was a long journey with quite some hiccups, but we made it.