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Palimpsests (vinyl LP)

Andrew Pekler, Giuseppe Ielasi - Palimpsests (vinyl LP)
Both noted for strikingly forward-thinking bodies of solo work dating back to the 1990s, the duo of Andrew Pekler & Giuseppe Ielasi—collaborators for the better part of a decade—reemerge with 'Palimpsests', their first outing with Shelter Press. Built from deconstructed layers of texture, tone, and arrhythmic percussiveness, the album's 2 sides distill 6 years of work into 9 splintered, airy reimaginings of minimalism—each surprising, creatively rigorous, and startlingly beautiful—that rest at the outer reaches of contemporary electroacoustic practice and musique concrète.
Based in Berlin and Milan respectively, Andrew Pekler and Giuseppe Ielasi have individually carved singular paths across numerous disciplines within experimental music for more than 20 years, each deploying sampling, synthesis, and acoustic sources to weave their own, distinct worlds of sonorous abstraction. Brought together by years of friendship and a shared devotion to layered texture and complex, fractured structure, the pair first joined their creative energies in 2013, a collaboration that culminated as the LP, 'Holiday For Sampler', issued by Planam.
'Palimpsests', the duo's second outing, draws its material from a series of improvisations made by the Pekler and Ielasi in Milan during 2015. Over the ensuing six years, those recordings would undergo various transformations—cut, reworked, sampled, and added to by each artist, working at geographic distance between Berlin, Kyoto and Monza—before culminating, like the album's title suggests, as a unique manifestation of musical palimpsest; "an object reused and altered, while still bearing visible traces of its earlier form".
With each of the album's compositions nodding toward a city with which Pekler and Ielasi hold biographical connections, 'Palimpsests' constructs sound as poetic metaphor; a series of ghosts—traces of memory, image, and action—cut and reassembled, in cycling permutations, before been set into action at a glacial pace with layered, transparent forms.
Defined by remarkable restraint and pointillistic precision, across the album's two sides Pekler and Ielasi weave the fractured remnants of their sessions - reduced to glitches and warbling fragments of texture and tonality - into pulsing expanses of spatial ambiance that defy imagism, blur the boundaries between the synthetic and organic—reducing their sources to a series of unknowns—recast the boundaries of electroacoustic practice on markedly singular terms.
Issued in a limited edition of 500 copies on black vinyl, with artworks on printed inner and outer sleeves by Traianos Pakioufakis.

Andrew Pekler (born in 1973 in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, lives and works in Berlin) is a sound artist whose experimental practice relies on the use of recontextualized samples and archives.

See also SG (Andrew Pekler); Groupshow (Jan Jelinek, Hanno Leichtmann & Andrew Pekler).
Giuseppe Ielasi (born in 1974, lives near Milan since 1990) started playing guitar in 1988, and worked for many years in the area of “improvised music” (long term collaborations with Renato Rinaldi in the duo Oreledigneur, Thomas Ankersmit, Michel Doneda, Ingar Zach, Dean Roberts).
Between 1997 and 2006 he has performed live with Taku Sugimoto, Jérôme Noetinger, Mark Wastell, Martin Siewert, Nmperign, Brandon Labelle, Nikos Veliotis, Alessandro Bosetti, Gert-Jan Prins, Phill Niblock, Oren Ambarchi, and many others.
From 2007 on, his main interest has been in site-specific solo performances, still using guitars as primary sound sources but integrating microphones and multi-channel speaker systems in order to create complex networks for sound diffusion in relationship to space.
He recently started a collaboration with Austrian video artist Michaela Grill (US tour in 2007, participations at the Rotterdam Film Festival, Evolution Festival in Leed, FilmSoundFilm in Marfa,TX) and is more and more involved in performances and installations with Renato Rinaldi and Armin Linke (ZKM Karlsruhe, Villa Romana Florence, Kunsthalle Berlin, Festival della Scienza Genova).
In 1998 he founded the “Fringes recordings” label, closed in 2005, and co-founded “Schoolmap Records” in 2006.

See also Bellows (Giuseppe Ielasi & Nicola Ratti).
 
published in December 2021
 
20.00
 
in stock
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