Looking for quality amid a slew of Nu-New Age Psych-drone Backwoods Ambient? Look no further than Sean McCann. Prosaic-sounding, maybe, in a world of wilfully mystique-laden monikers, but you can keep yer Bee Mask, Sparkling Wide Pressure, Pine Smoke Lodge, and whatnot, The Artist Currently Known As Sean McCann is the man for music-driven transport. Most recent release, The Capital, outstrips them all for sheer ambition and genrecidal sleight of hand.
The Capital from sean mccann on Vimeo.
That’s a snatch of "Aerial Sapphire Show," the astonishing opener to The Capital; it's followed up by the wooze-tastic “The Vanilla Maiden”:Sean McCann - The Vanilla Maiden by ForestGospel
Elsewhere someone profiles handily: “McCann counts nearly 20 labels as home to his music (including his own, Roll Over Rover. His 46 releases (and growing) over vinyl, cassette, CD, DVD, and VHS have dissected and deconstructed folk, drone, ambient, and Appalachia among the many touchstones McCann counts as influential. The Capital, in its dark morass, condenses each of those opposing forces into one album. Like a car meeting its junkyard fate, The Capital puts immeasurable pressure on the entirety of McCann’s canon until all that’s left is a compact cube of metal, plastic, and fiber. It spans geological ages and eons of changing topography until its lump of carbon is dug out a diamond. The Capital is not shy to immediately demonstrate its flawless beauty — album opener “Aerial Sapphire Show” is a spectacle onto itself; shimmering guitar and bowed strings bounce off McCann’s rubbery melody.”
If McCann's snared your ear’s fancy, there’s a scarily voluminous back catalogue awaiting, not to mention a potentially messy rummage around the gruzzy cassette underground - Digitalis, Stunned, Peasant Magik, Monorail Trespassing, 905Tapes, and DNT, to name but six - should you feel so compelled. Be reassured, anyway, that the pitfalls plaguing hyper-productive artists don’t seem to afflict Our Sean, as what has come this way thus far has been consistently quality. There’s no doubt The Capital is a great slice of idiosyncratic warped and shimmering post-ambient neo-psychedelica. In fact, in places these compositions, with their pianos, horns, string and wind instruments floating queasily atop synth waves, have about them a feeling of a po-mo update of classic 70s orchestral New Age vibes, ref. which, incidentally, see Iasos’s gloriously cheesy recently reissued Inter-Dimensional Music.
IASOSsampleA by funtunnel
Back to McCann, from The Sky is Filled With Incredible Wishes, the accompanying tape to The Capital, comes “Auditorium” (here's your mp3)
There’s much more McCann in the can, if you can diggit. Try "Over the stars (there is rest)" from his Sincere World LP that’s supposed to have come out late 2010/early2011 on Amethyst Sunset, and heard about first here.
Sincere World from sean mccann on Vimeo.
Not even sure where this one comes from – here just because it’s there:everafter from sean mccann on Vimeo.
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