Thomas Stone - An Act Of Surrender (Bloxham Tapes)

What Your Ears Say & The Cover Looks Like

---

What We Say

As we float aimlessly in the post-Christmas/pre-New Year Twilight zone not knowing whether to work or carry on overeating, the new electoacoustic LP from Thomas Stone on Bloxham Tapes, where his classical contrabassoon is played in all sorts of peculiarly resonant spots & then guided into the electronic present, is a wonderfully vague, eerily conjoined, oddly comforting soundtrack for all sorts of limbo states & gastric unease.

---

WHAT THE RELEASE NOTES SAY

Thomas's practice focuses on live performance, reconciling disparate influences such as his tinnitus, physical endurance, false memories, the physical effect of sound, séance, bass music and 20th-century composition. His influences include the chamber works of Galina Ustvolskaya and Dmitri Shostakovich, and the experimental techno of acts such as Emptyset and Pan Sonic.

Refined through presentation in various resonant spaces – from churches to a disused water tank; Cornish coastal caves to the hull of a ship – Thomas's compositions use contrabassoon and sampling devices as oscillators for his snare drum. Blurring the boundaries between acoustic and electronic sound sources, his post-classical / post-techno soundscapes use the relatively ugly means of long tones, dissonances and cyclic rhythms to reach moments of austere, fragile beauty.

"The genesis for this new work came from discussion with the visual artist Harrison Pearce,"explains Thomas. "I was developing a sound to become a sonic representation of a physical movement within one of Harrison's kinetic sculptures. The slow descending glissando is acoustically impossible on the contrabassoon – but achievable in conjunction with my live electronics set up. A key element in my compositions is how this electronic augmentation creates, or perhaps frees, an almost alter-ego presence, and I enjoy the tension created by deciding how much of this creeps through.

"Themes of transference and oppositional dualities are present in all of my work, manifesting literally by using my contrabassoon and drum machine as oscillators to drive sympathetic vibrations in my snare drum. Setting the acoustic against electronic, the dynamic against the static, dissonance against consonance.

"I wanted to explore what giving into this 'other' presence – maybe a coercive or higher force – meant. Not necessarily religious surrender, but acknowledging something ritualistic in the effort to yield. In this case surrender isn’t a negative connotation – with 'An Act Of Surrender', I was interested in whether surrender is active or passive; whether you are consumed by this ‘higher force’ or can exist within it."

Resistance is useless. Surrender to 'An Act Of Surrender'.

Composed, performed and recorded by Thomas Stone.
Mastered by Antony Ryan at RedRedPaw.

Design by Luke Drozd

---

IF YOU NEED MORE POST CLASSICAL & MODERN COMPOSITIONAL ADVENTURES THEN CHECK OUT THE SLOW NEOCLASSICAL PLAYLIST