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David Grubbs & Taku Unami // Failed Celestial Creatures LP

David Grubbs & Taku Unami // Failed Celestial Creatures LP

¥2,786
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We have started handling the works of the label Empty Editions operated by the Hong Kong gallery Empty Gallery.

This work is a collaboration between NY musician David Grubbs released by Drag City and Important, and improviser Taku Unami who is also active as a mastering engineer.Contains 7 ambient songs with guitar as the main source.Takamitsu Ohta is in charge of the design.It is carefully printed at a letterpress printing shop in Germany, and the inserts are also beautiful.

Labels and other works Click here for more information. ///Click here to see more Empty Editions releases available at Tobira.

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"Empty Editions is pleased to present Failed Celestial Creatures, an unexpected collaboration between composer-guitarist David Grubbs (Gastr Del Sol, The Red Krayola) and Tokyo-based musician Taku Unami. Primarily recorded in Kyoto, the album takes inspiration from the duo's shared musical The album's narrative approaches are rooted in both artists' previous experiments with the complex reciprocity between sound and text, including Grubbs' work With the poet Susan Howe and Unami's collaborations with writers such as Eugene Thacker and Evan Calder Williams. Failed Celestial Creatures draws in particular upon a group of short stories by the short-lived Japanese author Atsushi Nakajima (1909-42) --probably best known for inflecting Classical Chinese folktales with a modernist vein of absurdist and existential foreboding --as the i maginary substrates for its set of guitar-based instrumental explorations.

In Nakajima's “The Moon Over The Mountain,” a mad-poet metamorphosed into a hybrid-tiger recites poetry with an obscure defect, while “The Rebirth of Wujing” sees the titular river monster self-identifying as a “failed celestial being” [fallen angel]. historically understood as referencing “sacred meat from the altar fallen on the ground.” Such a primordial scene evokes the violation of the sacred as a tacit aspect of ritual .. This failure of ritual, always a condition (and perhaps even a technique) for musicians of Grubbs' and Unami's ilk, can be broadly understood as the primary point of departure for Failed Celestial Creatures. Positioned within this affective terrain, the album's title-track consists of a side-long progression of dirge-like riffs enveloped by clouds of vaporous electronics --eventually erupting into unruly squalls of feedback as Unami joins Grubbs on electric guitar. The B-side features a cluster of luminous guitar duets which are beguiling in their seeming effortlessness and simplici ty. Threadbare and fallen, Grubbs and Unami invoke the failed ritual, the spilling at the altar, always suggested at the precipice of sonic emergence ..."
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Empty Editions

Artist: David Grubbs & Taku Unami

Label: Empty Editions

We have started handling the works of the label Empty Editions operated by the Hong Kong gallery Empty Gallery.

This work is a collaboration between NY musician David Grubbs released by Drag City and Important, and improviser Taku Unami who is also active as a mastering engineer.Contains 7 ambient songs with guitar as the main source.Takamitsu Ohta is in charge of the design.It is carefully printed at a letterpress printing shop in Germany, and the inserts are also beautiful.

Labels and other works Click here for more information. ///Click here to see more Empty Editions releases available at Tobira.

-----------------------------

"Empty Editions is pleased to present Failed Celestial Creatures, an unexpected collaboration between composer-guitarist David Grubbs (Gastr Del Sol, The Red Krayola) and Tokyo-based musician Taku Unami. Primarily recorded in Kyoto, the album takes inspiration from the duo's shared musical The album's narrative approaches are rooted in both artists' previous experiments with the complex reciprocity between sound and text, including Grubbs' work With the poet Susan Howe and Unami's collaborations with writers such as Eugene Thacker and Evan Calder Williams. Failed Celestial Creatures draws in particular upon a group of short stories by the short-lived Japanese author Atsushi Nakajima (1909-42) --probably best known for inflecting Classical Chinese folktales with a modernist vein of absurdist and existential foreboding --as the i maginary substrates for its set of guitar-based instrumental explorations.

In Nakajima's “The Moon Over The Mountain,” a mad-poet metamorphosed into a hybrid-tiger recites poetry with an obscure defect, while “The Rebirth of Wujing” sees the titular river monster self-identifying as a “failed celestial being” [fallen angel]. historically understood as referencing “sacred meat from the altar fallen on the ground.” Such a primordial scene evokes the violation of the sacred as a tacit aspect of ritual .. This failure of ritual, always a condition (and perhaps even a technique) for musicians of Grubbs' and Unami's ilk, can be broadly understood as the primary point of departure for Failed Celestial Creatures. Positioned within this affective terrain, the album's title-track consists of a side-long progression of dirge-like riffs enveloped by clouds of vaporous electronics --eventually erupting into unruly squalls of feedback as Unami joins Grubbs on electric guitar. The B-side features a cluster of luminous guitar duets which are beguiling in their seeming effortlessness and simplici ty. Threadbare and fallen, Grubbs and Unami invoke the failed ritual, the spilling at the altar, always suggested at the precipice of sonic emergence ..."
-
Empty Editions

Artist: David Grubbs & Taku Unami

Label: Empty Editions