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Pogus

WICKHAM-SMITH, SIMON - Love & Lamentation

The Sandokai (The Harmony of Difference and Equality) is a prayer written by the eighth century Japanese Zen teacher Sekito Kisen. The basis for this piece was a tape given to Wickham-Smith by a nun of a recital at her monastery. He wanted to create of this sample a prayer without borders, a follow-up to an earlier work, Ave Regina Caelorum (2000, released on Extreme Bukake), in which he used the Latin plainsong of a prayer to the Virgin Mary in much the same way. The organ sample at the end is from a piece by Erik Satie, whose spirituality was equally strange and eclectic. All the samples have been stretched and pitch-shifted beyond (immediate) recognition; to the ears they have melded into something that seems at once both ethereal and solid. The Kin-kindness of Beforehand grew out of his Multiple Tongues project, a series of pieces in which Wickham-Smith exposed the spoken word in many different languages to a series of digital manipulations. The Kin-kindness of Beforehand is divided up into several distinct sections, each of which took on a particular persona during its creation. For the composer, this was the most complex of all the Multiple Tongues works, because he wanted to use specific strings of words and the quality of writer Rachel Beckers voice somehow to comment on each another. Love & Lamentation started life as a setting for voice and electronics of part of the biblical Book of Lamentation, but it quickly became clear to that the literal setting of words was not going to convey the melancholic intimacy that needed to be expressed. As a teenager Wickham-Smith had heard Alain Gheerbrants wonderful ethnomusicological recordings of a blind Turkish troubador and had fallen hopelessly in love with his voice and exquisite playing of the saz. About the same time, through his friend Richard Youngs, he had discovered also the ex tempore psalm singing of the Scottish Isle of Lewis. Fifteen years later, he decided that these two could be made somehow to work together to show the love and lamentation which he felt they both held in their deeper recesses, and which he wanted to present in this new piece. The result is a strange melée of feelings, repetitions and textures.-Pogus

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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.
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