KRAMER
MUSIC FOR FILMS EDITED BY MOTHS (MILKY CLEAR) - LP
UPC: 602309893514
Label: SHIMMY DISC
Format: LP
Release Date: August 26, 2022
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"What i have come to embrace is the working notion that there is no Past, and no Future. There is only a constantly evolving series of microscopic moments that constitute the miraculous Present. As fertile as it is and always has been, for me, Memory is a chimera. So if you asked me what it is exactly that i am trying to do now, with Music, be it through song, or through ambience, i would confess that what i'm doing couldn't be more simple; i am just trying to explain myself. I'm trying to show you who i am."
- Kramer, May 2022
In the ten compositions that comprise this new LP, mournful at times yet mysteriously life-affirming and generous in their scope, Kramer sees films where there are none, and composes his accompanying ambient soundtracks in a state of interrupted grace. Words, text, complete screenplays, character arcs, shooting scripts and storyboards swirl through his head as he puts his imagery to sound, and the results evoke a world in which moth s, drawn to the bright flickering lights of Cinema and the low humming lights of Dreams, in Kramer's own words, "...might never die".
Though often evocative of dreams, there is nothing even remotely somnambulant about this new work. It bears witness to a frenetic intelligence that asks for the listener's full and waking participation. Intensely passive yet electrically charged, the music comes before the film, as the film becomes the music.
The LP's nature reveals an interior dialogue between musician and choice. Each piece represents Kramer's encounter with the blank canvas of silence that greets him as a composer. Embracing sounds as objects and instruments of Truth, the end result of his process is as much about what is absent and what has been removed or edited away than what is left in its wake as artifacts of emotion. These pieces are the Spring frost of lost imaginings, vanitas to broken connections, visions nearly unrecordable by the human eye. Kramer envisions a music that functions to stop time, as an event that always plays in the present and never needs a past to give it a reference point. It is music that communicates in the most intimate way possible, as intricately and as deeply as the way it blossoms and shifts and evades categorization when exposed to thin air.
Drawn toward the light of a multitude of influences, we hear echoes of the feverishly frozen dreams of composers Morton Feldman, Terry Riley, Brian Eno and Arvo Part, melting alongside the surreal cinemas of David Lynch and The Brothers Quay, all parts converging to evoke a time and place that does not exist outside of the mind's eye of the listener. These ten works are fluid adventures in fathomless landscapes, emotions distilled and offered as a painterless canvas without a physical home. Each individual composition is an offering to a future memory, a chalice to be filled with the listener's own reactions to them. As a whole, the ten pieces form an image of ten circling planets in an expanding galaxy that colors itself anew with each subsequent listen. Movement, grace, and Peace.
After making much of his career within the practically anonymous labors of an independent record producer - one that embroiders the labors of others to be seen in their finest light, without shedding originality for a brand or to be enhanced with jarring, trend-setting effects recycled for commerce and profits - Kramer's collaborations strive to give a purer vision to Art and a confidence in wandering without boundaries through each artist's ever-evolving intuitive processes. He regards the undiscovered oceans of creative possibilities without judgements or fears. For him, the act of making Art is the act of fearing nothing.
Composing these works for films that do not exist, Kramer collaborates on the video art for this project with Dutch Multi-Media artist Tinca Veerman, who crafts a uniquely idiosyncratic and profoundly sensual visual world for Kramer's visceral imagination. Veerman's stunning creations for the human eye are a perfect compliment for Kramer's audio love letters for the human soul.
As a solo artist, Kramer has always worked with his own unique vocabulary. He is a sound-poet; a restless interpreter of his own imagination and emotions using the experience of his works to invite stillness, openness, Truth, and a selfless surrender to the infinite possibilities that manifest themselves by the simple yet sometimes radical act of Listening.
1 - Like the Planets Love the Sun
2 - Bukowski on the Beach
3 - Stars Will Die Tonight
4 - Nothing is Ever Lost
5 - Requiem for Max
6 - Burial at Sea
7 - Ladder to the Moon
8 - All the Momentary Moths
9 - Dreams We Never Dreamed
10 - Or Perhaps You Imagined It All