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- Overprinted silver CDR
- Artist-made six-panel roll-fold jacket with CD enclosure.
- Eight-page sewn-in poetry pamphlet.
- Four photographic prints on heavyweight matte card.
- Music download card.
- Signed by the artist.
- Limited edition of 25.
Includes unlimited streaming of Bearer
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Drawing on the same phonographic source as 2023’s ‘Before We Lie Down in Darknesse’, but accumulating tributary currents of cello, viola and mandola over the course of 2024, ‘Bearer’ is a single extended recording for the dark, viscid channels of water that seep through the peat and granite of Connemara’s lowland coastal bogs before draining into the sea. The Irish word for river mouth, ‘inbhear’, finds its ultimate source in the Proto-Indo-European word ‘*bher-’, meaning ‘to carry, to bear children’, but ‘Bearer’ eddies outwards from these etymological origins, seeking further protogenetic material to be absorbed into its watery matrix, tracing the influx of each subterranean channel to the foothills of nearby mountains, and following their efflux into sea basins of undocumented bathymetric depths.
In some glossaries, ‘inbhear’ has a secondary metaphoric sense, meaning ‘an ostiary’ or ‘watcher over the House of God’. In the Catholic ministry, an ostiary is one of the four ‘minor orders’, the others being the order of the lector, the exorcist, and the acolyte. In something of a heretical departure from this idea, ‘Bearer’ instead invokes those unseen and undocumented watchful presences of the land itself — what the accompanying poetic text hermetically terms ‘the occupants’, ‘the hazed figures’ and ‘the familiars’. Recalling the secondary sense of ‘*bher-’, meaning ‘to bear children’, the combination of text and music in ‘Bearer’ therefore serves to conjure a landscape that is pregnant with hidden agency, perpetually on the point of issuing forth, but always at the periphery of our apprehension.
I was a little skeptical at first with how this switched up the project’s sound, but listening to this album all the way through is absolutely breathtaking! It feels like the world dying, but naturally and beautifully. bloodybook
The debut LP from the Chicago multidisciplinary artist strikes a bold balance between meticulous structure and improvisation. Bandcamp Album of the Day Mar 10, 2022
This came out of nowhere on my Bandcamp feed. It's extraordinary- in terms of ethnography of place, a little reminiscent perhaps of some of the works of the great Harold Budd, but with different instrumentation, and altogether more sombre and foreboding, like a crystal clear memory of a place you've never been. And there's shitloads more...
This is why I love Bandcamp- you get to listen to things you'd otherwise never hear in a million years.
Unconditionally recommended. kickingmachine