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Kevin Sims

Yarrow Canon

Label: Orb Tapes

Format: CD

Genre: Compositional

In stock

€12.00
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*150 copies limited edition* "Most of the music I am attracted to represents some kind of undoing. Sun Ra's undoing of the big band, or of the jazz solo. Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern's undoing of the classical music concert. The A.A.C.M.'s undoing of the jazz combo and the club date. Pauline Oliveros' undoing of the musical score. Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, and Cornelius Cardew's various undoings of the profession. What's more, none of these undoings are antagonistic or destructive. The thing undone is the thing unstrung, unthreaded from its predictable row and progression. In my own playing, my desire to undo things has at times led to "not doing" them. Yarrow Canon is a project that traces a sustained attempt I made, during the on-again-off-again months of solitude in 2020 and 2021, to actually (un)do it. 

The album is divided into two halves, solos on drums (tracks 1-3), and duos/trios (with myself) on keyboards (tracks 4-6). Each half begins in the middle of the 20th century and ends in the second decade of the 21st. Each half begins with familiar percussion instruments and ends with stranger/other ones accompanying my voice. 

[...] Each piece is only loosely resonant with the next. Traditional technique is translated into the technique of listening, and finally into the counter-technique of singing. Yarrow, the familiar white flower of roadside meadows, serves as an emblem of an alternative canon, a common practice that undoes the boundary between virtuosity's lucid rigor and amateurism's ambiguous song. I would like to thank Scott Wolschleger, Abby Minor, James Searfoss, Chiyoko Szlavnics, and Mike Tierney for their help in seeing this project through." - Kevin Sims 

Details
Cat. number: OT_179
Year: 2023
Notes:

All recordings made in Aaronsburg, PA by Kevin Sims. Images and more information at https://orbtapes.bandcamp.com/album/yarrow-canon