released March 1, 2024
All compositions by Michaël Attias (Ravished Limbs Music, SESAC).
Basic tracks recorded in New York City on June 12, 2021 at East Side Sound by Marc Urselli; keyboard overdubs at Douglass Studio in Brooklyn by Juan Manuel Trujillo on October 19, 2022.
Additional recording, mix and master by Christopher Hoffman at his Bushwick studio in 2022/23.
Art + design by TJ Huff (
huffart.com).
Liner Notes by Michaël Attias:
The first time the band that became LuMiSong ever played together was during the Great Lockdown of July 2020. The others wore masks while I stood twenty feet away with the door behind me open to a Gowanus side-street. I hadn’t shared a sound or negotiated an eighth-note with anybody for months and the experience overwhelmed me with emotion. (The most basic facts of collective music-making are the most profound.) We all brought in music to that session and to the many that followed. Matt and Santi are both prolific composers, and I had (still have) a pretty enormous backlog of unrecorded compositions. It was a thrill to hear the pieces take on dimension and color and the personality-traits of my fabulous friends, great comrade musicians getting together just for the music—all calendars as blanked-out and empty as the streets. I knew this would be the band and the music for my next record, whenever that would be...
The following Summer, confinement had loosened its grip enough for us to play a live-streamed gig at Barbès in Brooklyn before a tiny in-person audience. We went into the studio the next day and recorded nine pieces. What emerged from listening to the roughs over the ensuing months was a record I hadn’t expected to make. I focused on four of the pieces and over the following year combined takes, overdubbed like crazy and mixed each piece as if it was its own record, its own movie. The guys had played with so much fire and accuracy and groove, the basic tracks kept on blossoming through my fever dreams.
Music can be many things at different times, here it is an art of collage and folding, sound upon sound, pulse against pulse, a gathering of LuMinous intensities of Song. Or, a mosaic: each tile—psychedelic camel pop, electro-Lacy, alien-Glam, dabke Mingus, urban Webern— a palimpsest of worlds, memories and artifacts arranged palindromically to tell of the journey from Apartment #63 Yi king hibernation to Spring breaking through the cracks of Hood Park in Washington Heights with the GWB in hallucinatory nearness, and back again to a Sahara of the Imagination with ghost bands and doppelgangers lurking in the texture, something unseen, something unheard…
Big thanks to Santi, Matt and Mark for their amazing playing and humanness and hilarity, to Christopher Hoffman for being Eyegor to my Frankenstein and playing some mean cello on the last track. And of course to Adam Hopkins for being willing to release a second album with me, these echoes of day.
Additional thanks to NY State Pandemic Insurance, Lou, Marc, Juanma, Lady F, Nowlina, and the several great musicians who played earlier versions of these pieces and taught them back to me. Love to all of you!
Quartet Music Vol. I: LuMiSong composition notes by Michaël Attias:
#63 (Settled): When L. and I moved into our current home in Washington Heights, I consulted the Yi-King as I always do on momentous occasions, and through chance operation (tossing coins six times) obtained hexagram 63, coincidentally the number of my new apartment and most auspiciously entitled "Settled". Perfect! The rhythmic, metric and harmonic materials of #63 were derived from the superimposition of the oracle's two trigrams: 2-3-2 over 3-2-3 (7 over 8)—water over fire. The several wurli and synth parts and saxophone harmonies were added in post-production. Like Hexway, this is a 21-bar form ( 3 x 7 bars of 4.)
Mr Softee Is a Front is a tale from my new hood about the ice cream truck that parks in a forlorn street running parallel to the off-ramp of the GWB (where no child will go.) As old-timers from the neighborhood will attest, Mr Softee is indeed a "front" and the theme it blasts through the long summer days summons its targeted customers for something else than ice-cream. You can hear fragments of this infuriating tune stretched and chopped during the exposition and coming out of the (killing!) piano solo. Multi-sectioned and through-composed, it's the only fully live-in-the-studio piece on the record and the band (everyone is featured) eats it up.
NME, or The Enemy, is built on a symmetrical scale voice-led through a cycle of ascending fifths. The first part is a slow-moving fully-notated piano/bass duet that evolves into an open improvisation, while a quiet synth colors (contaminates) the overtone resonances of the piano. The second part, the groove section, is a 14-bar form with a notated drum part that spans two bars of 15/8 and can be felt both in 5 and as a big 3. The bass line is half the length (one bar of 15/8) and the rhodes halves it again (one bar of 15/16) on the repeat. In the first section, I superimposed two separate takes of the piano/bass duet. The quieter take, which I call the Ghost Band, is slightly faster and seems to anticipate the full-sounding flesh-and-blood band, like tape bleed. The two performances run simultaneously until just after the first groove-section theme. The idea of the Double returns in the alto solo(s). Santi, Matt and Mark play their asses off on this track (and all the others.) More wurli and synth overdubs on the themes. Piano and rhodes were live in the room.
Hexway Liner, a cruise-ship to Hades, is another 21 bar form (3 x 7 bars of 3.) The materials expand and contract over the cycle (5-7-9-8-6-4-3 with the last section in retrograde). Intervals are derived from the same trichord Webern used in Op 24, forming the two hexachords that hold the music together while also pulling it apart. I'm sure early and late exposures to Devo, Threadgill and Stefan Wolpe are in the DNA of this piece. Christopher Hoffman— whose work on the post-production is integral to whatever this album has turned out to be— added some mean cello overdubs, otherwise this one is live.
Out Of Your Head Records | OOYH 025
