BLOCK, OLIVIA - Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea
"With Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea, Olivia Block charts out a deepening current of work that condenses her longer form approaches into a series of richly fluid vignettes. Each piece is led by a bass pattern, the same seven notes, which reappear throughout the album in different configurations. The tonal repetition creates an overall sense of reduction and amplification; an extreme realization of focus. Tracing waves of warped Mellotron melodies and harmonies, the album celebrates an unfolding of the acoustic horizon, and dwells in a perpetual release of revealed frequencies and pulsing of waves which merge together to unite, and then divide, in time. Easily her most articulate and considered work to date, Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea reads as the first chapter in a new book of sound to come.
From Olivia: "During the lockdown, unable to do anything in the world, I turned inward and adopted a regular practice of listening with intention, while on psychedelic mushrooms. The mushrooms helped me to listen somatically, pulling my ears towards low tonal patterns and the warped sounds of a broken Mellotron. I started playing in my studio, creating bass-driven pieces on my vintage Korg synth organ, using a very limited tonal palette. The pandemic seemed like a strange dream or a surrealistic science fiction story. I re-read the brilliant surrealistic science fiction novel, Ice, by Anna Kavan, which describes a frozen post-apocalypse. Mentally, I connected Kavan's ice-world with the isolation of the lockdown. I approached this album as the soundtrack to this speculative science fiction film. It's an attempt to translate my emotions about this surreal and strange historical moment into sound." - Room40 .
After nearly a decade of false starts, multiple game plans veering off the rails, and a handful of shattered hopes and/or dreams, the odyssey is finally complete—the new Fusetron site is here.
This is the first phase of a multipart rollout that will span the next few months: the currently browsable stock includes miscellaneous new releases from the past 8+ months (we have a lot of catching up to do), plus approximately a third of our backstock. Note that we’ve reduced/slashed prices on many titles and will continue to do so in order to make room for new stock. We’ll also be expanding / tweaking / improving / debugging the site itself (for example, we still have work to do on the automated international postage system, not to mention the inevitable inventory discrepancies that come with transferring an ancient and massive database to a new system).
Over the next few months, as we take inventory, clean house, and delve into our storage, we will be uploading thousands of additional items, gradually, on a near-daily basis. This will include the majority of the LPs, as well as many titles, in all formats, once thought long-gone. Many currently “sold out” items are likely to resurface.
Finally, once our general backstock is up (probably in the next two or three months) we’ll begin making our extensive stockpile of rarities available online for the first time: tons of random out-of-print titles, "deadstock," warehouse finds, secondhand collectibles, etc., accumulated over the past few decades.
Frequent/returning customers will be getting early access to these items. Details to follow on how this will work (a priority mailing list? a 'frequent flyer'-like program?), but it will not be based on dollars spent. We want to reward those who consistently support us, especially in the discogs marketplace era (to those who show up trying to poach five copies of a one-off rarity, and nothing else, ever… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).
So—we suggest you take some time to dig through the site—even we’ve been surprised by what’s been turning up, and there’s much more to come.
