Article
Spotlight 1
Albums
Aquarelle
Barem
Biosphere
Chubby Wolf
Collard-Neven
Cuni & Durand
FareWell Poetry
Field Rotation
Fonogram
Keith Freund
Freiband
Buckminster Fuzeboard
Harley Gaber
Richard Ginns
Grauraum
Hilton/Phillips
Jenny Hval
Jasper TX
Kenneth Kirschner
The Last Hurrah!!
Letna
The Lickets
Melorman
Penalune
Mat Playford
Radiosonde
Salt Lake Electric Ens.
Will Samson
Janek Schaefer
Phillip Schroeder
Silkie
Sølyst
Swimming
Nicholas Szczepanik
Talvihorros
Kanazu Tomoyuki
Luigi Turra
Watson & Davidson
y0t0
You
Compilations / Mixes
Bleak Wilderness Of Sleep
Lee Curtiss
Deep Medi Volume 3
Goldie
Goldmann & Johannsen
Heidi
Mindfield
Priestley & Smith
SM4 Compilation
EPs
Agoria
Bop Singlayer
Botany
Duprass
Margaret Dygas
Fennesz
Golden Gardens
I Am A Vowel
Mobthrow
Dana Ruh
Keith Freund:
Constant Comments
Experimedia
Constant Comments is an utterly charming solo outing from Keith Freund, who otherwise plays and records with his wife in the Akron, Ohio-based outfit Trouble Books. Gentle and bucolic in nature, the album finds Freund weaving multiple layers of chiming electric guitar playing into twelve fluid, pastoral settings of typically concise length.
Everyday sounds—cars honking and trains clattering, children laughing and playing, birds chirping, voices speaking, dogs barking—surface throughout the album, grounding its pieces with a real-world sense of time and place (an effect established immediately when “Mont Boron” introduces the album with outdoors field recordings of children playing). Freund adopts somewhat the role of observer, with his guitar meanderings (augmented in places by keyboard textures) acting as a running commentary or bemused presence in response to the prosaic life events happening around him. Representative of the album's laid-back style, “Horses on Air” casts an early morning, summery spell with crystalline guitar picking wrapped in a dense blanket of tape hiss. Sometimes Freund gives the stage completely to the field recording, as he does at the end of “Deep Shit Sunburn” when crashing waves are the only sounds heard, and the exception to Freund's rule of concision is “The Ortzi,” an eight-minute laconic meditation that underlays Freund's melodic guitar figures, keyboard swells, and a foreign-speaking voice with a pedal point drone
Fittingly for such a low-key and intimate project, Freund recorded the material using electric guitar and elka rhapsody onto lo-fi casette tape between 2007 and 2010, and Experimedia has made the recording available in a twelve-inch vinyl format in a pressing of 300 copies, with 100 of them in green vinyl.
September 2011