Last Mountain – Lisa Butel & Brent Cross
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Last Mountain is the final release of our trilogy featuring piano samples and voice. It is derived from our personal experiences with parental loss, the awakening of memories on the land with our family who were homesteading settlers and the implications of colonization, changing landscapes and genocide.
Album 3 approaches this knowledge carefully and aims to reconcile past and current wrongs, and to remind us to share love with our loved ones openly while they are still here with us. The foundation tracks for this album were recorded by sampling the ambient sound from the inside of the family piano. The piano, a colonial instrument, could represent the failed attempt by the settlers to wipe out a culture already present. This instrument was intentionally reduced down to its’ most basic sounds and then reimagined through sampling and processing. The recorded reverberance is the piano’s main contribution to the project.
Lisa’s vocals were then improvised and recorded using only the first take. Her sound is captured by a ribbon microphone popular during the mid century that is both honest and revealing. Her stories, are improvised from a theme and do not follow a song structure. Imperfection is rampant and intentional in this recording and we celebrate it for its’ rawness, truth and vulnerability. This album is both a land acknowledgement and a personal pledge to participate in the reclamation movement.
Artists: Lisa Butel, Brent Cross and guests Johanna Hauser and G.Scott.
Contributions of raw sound and clarinet playing by Johanna Hauser and 2 of the pieces are sonic collages created by collaborator G.Scott from studio outtakes.
Photo credits: Carol Sawyer (photo of both of us)
Brent Cross (arty photo)
REVIEW: ~Dominic Valvona
monolithcocktail.com/2021/11/04/the-perusal-22-dear-laika-stereo-total-boom-diwan-ft-nduduzo-makhathini-spacelab/
“This month selection of choice music (as you may have noticed) is particularly heavy on voice/vocal experimentation; none so more then the double offerings from the Vancouver-based collaboration of sound artists, Lisa Butel and Brent Cross.
Another product of stress-relief and vehicle for abstract anxieties, feelings and terms of bereavement felt through the creation of music, during the harrowing and restrictive pandemic this sonic and empirical voiced partnership created a moiety of albums. As release valves for pent-up feelings of loss and isolation, these two album suites are full of blended and manipulated minimal synthesised sounds, piano accompaniments from a family heirloom, and a gauzy flow of uttered, elegiac, aria and tonal vocals.
A Low Lament For Love And Loss takes a one-hour improvised session and breaks it down into seven parts of varied elegy and ethereal sung mystique and diaphanous outpours. To a flutter, ripples and fuzzy synth undulations and drones, Butel’s voice yearns syllables and sounds. Often they sound otherworldly, or as in the case of the slowed, stripped Red Mecca era Cabaret Voltaire, buzzing and crisp Middle Eastern tinged ‘Intro To Lament’, like a mysterious call to prayer from atop of a minaret.
Wafted, drifted, translucent yet deeply felt that voice and accompaniment is entrancing but often tragic; dealing as it does from the loss of Cross’s mother, whose Heintzman piano can be heard throughout, fluctuating between sentimental tinkles, singular patted notes and melodious dreamy passages.
The Feeling Of Walking is in a very similar vein, though the process is a little different, using the voices as a sort of comfort and meditation. Opening beautiful gesture ‘I’m Giving Out The Love’ is like a mix of ambient generated dreaminess and slowcore; ‘Super Skies’ an almost monastic kind of poetry. There’s even a kind of Japanese dulcimer-like feel to the ghostly, delicate ‘The Beautiful Women’.
Two congruous releases of pent-up emotions delivered in the form of an experiment between voice, piano and a palette of purposeful oscillations and manipulations, Cross and Butel’s lockdown albums act as a personal process but above all sound fully immersive and cathartic: A communal, connective experience.”
Kevin Press – The Moderns – modernsblog.ca. FRIDAY FIVE: NOV.5, 2021
Five new releases you need to know:
1.Lisa Butel & Brent Cross – Feeling of Walking: Songs of 2020 (Independent)
2. JJJJJerome Ellis – The Clearing (NNA Tapes)
3. Nick Malkin – Nothing Blues (Mondaj)
4. Marina Rosenfeld – Index (Room40)
5. jared Sagar – Vessel (Esc.rec.)
Lisa Butel and Brent Cross 