Eno, eat your heart out. Ezekiel Honig's reworking & opening out of his recent Folding In On Itself goes far beyond a couple of remixes & a 'special edition' boxed set. Rather, he has re-engaged with the Type release at a profound level - or two levels, indeed, since his follow-up includes both a kind of live deconstruction/reconstruction & a series of paintings & collages.
Both responses - "a music release with new art made for each iteration, a painting with accompanying sound" - add new blurrings & further layers to the original's drowsy, sedimented qualities. Each rethinks its host in some way - Folding's somewhat submerged feel played up & refracted across the space of an aquatic hour, themes & tones allowed to drift like flotsam & jetsam on water, & this idea of spreading, bleached driftwood extended on into the muted, smeary paintings, & even their host material - & invites us to as well, of course.
This post features two extracts from the live performance (together, about a quarter of it, which Honig delivers as a high-res 500MB+ AIFF file) & the first three pieces in what he intends to be a "continuum" of 99 unique but linked paintings.
"I'm releasing a live performance, from the release party for Folding In On Itself, recorded in New York City on May 12, 2011. The set is very much connected to the album in scope and feel, warm electroacoustic settings with muted kick drums and spacious melodic fragments, but it is a disassembly and reassembly of those pieces, an improvised arrangement based on loops and individual sounds, which also makes liberal use of elements from other material, both finished and in-process. In comparison to the album, or any of my albums, it is more open-ended and creates different relationships among sounds, coaxing them into one new fluid piece. The hope is that it retains a narrative sense, and perhaps more so because of the extended and continuous nature of it.
In this instance I wanted to make something that is as much about the visual, physical art object as it is about the sound. Instead of a package per se, I'm making textural paintings and collages on wood, which come with a code that can be used to download a full resolution file of the music. Rather than tack on a CD to the object, I wanted to call attention to the lack of need for a physical delivery device for the audio, allow it to break free of packaging constraints of any sort, and go a step further than cover art.
Each piece is one in this series of 99, but is essentially on its own at the same time. The aim is to follow a guideline based on the first piece but each one is quite different in texture, stroke, color, and all the subtleties of the hand, as opposed to printing replication of any kind. Each is part of a continuum, so that one leads to an idea about the next, and connects to it, but does not restrain where it can go. It is a music release with new art made for each iteration, a painting with accompanying sound."
More of Honig's arresting thoughtfulness in this recent post & this mnml ssgs interview from a few years back...
Extras:
Concrete economics - ezekiel honig [live edit from Le Placard set - Montreal, 2008; re-up]
