Melbourne based producer, composer (for film and theatre), arranger, and sound designer, Adam Casey (The Boy Who Spoke Clouds/ Seascapes of the Interior/ Trapist Afterland) has a new album due for release on New Zealand label East Cape Calling. Like much of the material released on the label it’s a gentle atmospheric emotion laden work that slows everything down and makes you appreciate every nuance. This piece ‘The Aether’ explores ‘anabasis’, the sparkling flight through the earth, into the aether. It’s music for an expanding consciousness.
The album was created by contrabass and then later arranged for a full band. Instrumentation included contrabass, electric bass, drum kit, 808, no input feedback, short wave radio, dulcitone, tanpura, hackbrett, mellotron, bells, voice, strings, and horns. Casey played all the instruments himself, while his partner Katie Walsh collaborated choral arrangements and performance. So whilst it sounds like a full band recording, due to Covid-19 lockdowns Casey ostensibly performed all the instrumentation himself.
This is what he has to say about it:
“The album was largely inspired by Don Cherry’s Organic Music Society output and Alice Coltrane’s ‘Journey to Satchidananda’ album, particularly the mesmeric bass playing of Charlie Haden.‘In the last 5 years, I’ve fallen in love with the ‘astral jazz’ movement from the 1960s and 1970s . John and Alice Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, SunRa, Edie Gale, and in the contemporary landscape, Joshua Abrams and Natural Information Society and Angel Bat Dawid. But Don Cherry, for me, he was the master of them all, not due to the complexity of the work, but, the devotion and mesmerism he was seeking as a player and from his band.”
Nether | Aether will be released via East Cape Calling on the 25th of November. You can find it here.
