Ethan Rose is a musician, sound-artist, and faux-pilot who resides in Portland. His music reflects his varied interests in old technologies, new sounds, and all things both inside and out. Much of Ethan’s music has centered around his fascination with automated instruments from years long past, including things like music boxes, player pianos, and carillons. Although, don’t be mistaken – he is more interested in pulling new sounds and ideas out of these old and varied devices rather than treating them with a sense of preservation. Not to say that he doesn’t appreciate them for what they are, only that he is more interested in linking their histories to the modern age for the love of the sounds that they make. His latest album, “Spinning Pieces,” was released in 2007.
Boomkat guys, which mainly wants you just to buy records but at list are aware that these records exist:
Oregon’s Ethan Rose follows up last year’s Ceiling Songs album with this wonderful collection of mechanised electronic pieces. Rose even brought together old player pianos, prepared music boxes and various electronic treatments consistent with these sorts of primitive, automated sounds. There’s a very tangible warmth to these three extended pieces, with all the ramshackle instrumentation maintaining some semblance of acoustic identity whilst being taken way out of context by the machinations of Rose’s processes. You might compare these sorts of working methods to some of Oren Ambarchi’s recent motorised pieces or Jason Khan’s mechanical percussion drones, but there’s a far stronger grip on melody and all-round approachability in these pieces. ‘Singing Tower’ introduces itself with a single bell-like chime, before accumulating a wonderfully melodic, sonorous density. As the piece develops the shuffle and flutter of the chimes dissolves into a grainy landscape of thick string-like drone tones, not unlike the kind of sound textures you might find on a Phillip Jeck piece. ‘…The Dot And The Line’ is even better, comprised of a far more spacious, airy acousmatic environment, piling sounds from the natural world on top of rickety layers of piano. It makes for a bewitching listen, never quite resorting to outright drone or overly busy sound masses. Somewhere toward the middle of the piece the core sounds drop away to leave only a broad stereo field of crackle. It’s a thoroughly beautiful piece, one which slowly dies out into thinned, waif-like tones, setting itself up as an ideal contrast to the thick, glazed sonorities of ‘Miniature & Sea’, a piece that swells up to a gloopy mass before a fiery organ tone cuts through the mix, taking the album to a searing finish.
