To celebrate the opening of the exhibition Future Beauty : 30 Years of Japanese Fashion at the Barbican (London), Janek Schaefer offers a 33 minute version of “Unfolding” – as a free download!
My advise: do not hesitate, and download it before the sendspace link runs out!
“Unfolding” offers a fascinating piece of drone music that slowly evolves (unfolds) to different views and environments. The scene changes almost unnoticed, but if you would skip through it the sound would be dramatically different. Slowly building feedback, environmental sounds of wind and water, slow orchestral loops (Basinski-style), unexpected hiss-chords – all perfectly fitting the basic drone.
Most long-form ‘drone music’ is not very easy to stay awake to. But that is no problem with “Unfolding”, just because enough is happening to keep you alert, while at the same time the gentle calmness is never disturbed. To me, this is one of the most surprising drone music pieces I have heard recently.
And that is only the stereo mix….it must be absolutely immersive gorgeousness to hear it in the full surround 8 speaker environment it was originally created for.
“The composition is made from 4 x 44 minute shifting loops spread out across four pairs of speakers in the space, subtley shifting the sound textures and tones all around the different levels and zones of the show.”
If anyone in or near London has the chance to visit this exposition: please report back about your experience!
“Future Beauty” runs until february 2011.
You can download this track for free [here]
BTW – do not download it from the Barbican site itself since that is a less resolution file format!
Thanks to Janek Schaefer for sharing this so generously!