Countless congruities

Two alluring, affecting new-ish collaborations - with Steinbruechel (Seam) & Marcus Fischer (Two / Twenty-Two) - add further lustre to Cory Allen's lovely body of work. While both exhibit what Marc Weidenbaum (Disquiet) nicely terms "gentle sonic psychedelics that bring texture to what might otherwise be termed ambient" (in his predictably insightful reflections around Two / Twenty-Two: see below), Seam is distinctive for its happy marriage of intensely detailed, almost gritty microsound with a huge bass rumble. Two / Twenty-Two, in contrast, deploys a larger, messier palette (twangs & groans, even...) to shape a more urgent, more 'narrative' sound - especially in the second part, Seventy-Seven. 


A fair few Allen streams here. Several albums on Spotify too...


Blurb: "Fourteen months and countless folders of audio files later, Steinbrüchel and Cory Allen offer their first collaborative album entitled «Seam». An intensive and process driven work period resulted in an album that integrates the two artist's individual soundworlds. Each sound was processed and multiplied by both artists, forming a sound archive of individual threads. The compositions were then sewn and stitched together using the collection of the archive. Connecting each composition is an inbetween thread which weaves the album's tracks together.


The «- -- - --» audio process was extended into the design and production of the physical packaging. The cover design is based on a system which reflects the track order and the artists' contributions to the creation of the compositions."


steinbrüchel + cory allen - seam 06


steinbruchel + cory allen - seam 02














Way beyond blurb (Marc Weidenbaum, Disquiet): "The Internet is a congruity engine. The ceaseless churn of online databases aligns any two or more things found to have in common any one thing. 

Cities with similar names require clarification from mapping systems. Faces of people with similar names appear together in image searches, forcibly conflated into one extended family. 

Congruity is especially powerful regarding individuals with the same birthday. Factors such as seasonal attributes and development relative to classmates are widely accepted to explain perceived similarities between individuals otherwise born years, even centuries, apart. 

Two / Twenty Two by Cory Allen and Marcus Fischer occurred because the two musicians acted on their shared February 22 birthday. Both live in cities considered artistic outposts in otherwise rustic states (Allen: Austin, Texas; Fischer: Portland, Oregon), both have professional experience in visual design, and both explore gentle sonic psychedelics that bring texture to what might otherwise be termed ambient. All coincidence, certainly. Allen and Fischer stacked the deck in congruity’s favor by providing each other with a set of samples from which to devise new music. The result is two rough fragile recordings. They have the burnish of delicate objects that survived significant tumult. As for the tremulous piano in track two, perhaps it’s a nod to Chopin, who was, according to various databases tracking such things, also born on February 22."

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