{"product_id":"deathprod-sow-your-gold-in-the-white-foliated-earth","title":"Deathprod - Sow Your Gold In The White Foliated Earth [ Vinyl ]","description":"\u003cp\u003eSow Your Gold in the White Foliated Earth exists first as a curator's fancy - in this case\r\nfrom Oslo's Ultima Festival for contemporary music in 2014. The idea was to give revered\r\nNorwegian experimental electronic musician Helge Sten, aka Deathprod, access to\r\nseminal avant-garde composer Harry Partch's self-designed, custom-made, specialized,\r\ninvented instruments - an orchestra tuned to just intonation, using up to 43 intervals\r\ninstead of the standard 12 for the most commonly used Western equal temperament.\r\nAn artist with a 30+ year career and an uncompromising reputation that reflects the\r\nemotional specificity of his uneasy, yet compelling sound, maintained throughout his\r\nexpansive discography, Sten was an intriguing choice for such a project. Although he\r\nattended art school, training in electronic music and sound art, he had little experience\r\nwith acoustic instruments and can neither read nor write music notation. Yet he's been\r\nengaged with Partch's music, and outsider art more generally, since he was a teenager.\r\nHis resulting piece\/composition for the project was originally intended only for\r\nperformance by Cologne-based Ensemble Musikfabrik, for a series of concerts in five\r\nEuropean cities between 2015 and 2018. It's Musikfabrik that undertook the painstaking,\r\nexpensive process of building an entire set of the composer's creations - the second only\r\nto the originals built by Partch himself. They are the professional musicians and virtuosic\r\ninstrumentalists that had to re-train and re-educate on these unknown and experimental\r\nsound sculptures in non-standard tunings. And they house this large, gorgeous physical\r\ninstrumentarium and deal with the enormous logistics of working with it, sometimes\r\nshipping the fragile pieces to other locales via semi-trucks or ships.\r\nBecause of such monumental efforts, Musikfabrik are notoriously guarded with\r\nrecordings of the instruments. And rightly so. They're the only ones allowed to perform\r\non them, too. But Sow Your Gold isn't Musikfabrik playing. Instead, Sten spent days and\r\nnights alone with the instrumentarium in Cologne. He played the instruments himself\r\nwhile recording, layering the recordings and editing without effects to compose an 'audio\r\nscore' for Musikfabrik to work from in order for the ensemble to perform the piece.\r\n(Partch also regularly worked this way, although he would transcribe afterwards.\r\nLikewise, Sten worked with a professional arranger to create a detailed score, too.) So,\r\nthat makes Sow Your Gold an even less likely rarity - partly why it's release comes seven\r\nyears after it's creation.\r\nIf you ask Sten about the album's title, he'll point you to the text he borrowed it from -\r\nMichael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens by H.M.E. de Jong, a 1969 study of a 1617 book of\r\nalchemical emblems - and notable passages dealing with alchemy, chemistry, and\r\nagriculture, all transformative processes. And while that may sound complicated, his\r\ntakeaway is simple: \"You have to break something down to create something new,\" - a\r\nlesson he felt related strongly to his own musical process, especially in this project.\r\nSo, while Sow Your Gold in the White Foliated Earth is a piece written for specific, oddly\r\ntuned, extremely rare and unusual instruments, and for a certain ensemble - namely,\r\nsome of the finest contemporary musicians in Europe - Sten grew fond of the audio\r\nscore, recognizing it as coming directly from the creative process in it's purest, most\r\nnatural form. And so from a foliated earth, where obscure tradition, treasured scarcity,\r\nimmense effort, and patient certainty layer and criss-cross, comes rugged gold, polished\r\nto shining by one outsider for another.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Alliance Entertainment","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54214905594185,"sku":"7072822402013","price":3.3,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0970\/7329\/9785\/files\/4123228-2864098.jpg?v=1776425512","url":"https:\/\/vintagespinvinyl.com\/products\/deathprod-sow-your-gold-in-the-white-foliated-earth","provider":"My Store","version":"1.0","type":"link"}