"Ensamble Acústico was conceived in the early 1980s by Billy Pereyra and Eduardo Roland in Blancarena, a resort on the coast of the Río de la Plata, east of Colonia, Uruguay. In 1989, after only a few performances, the duo released their first and only album: a cassette of eight songs titled Un Exceso De Luz ("An Excess of Light"), co-released by independent labels Perro Andaluz (Uruguay) and Circe (Argentina). Despite being limited to just 500 copies the album was critically acclaimed and lauded as the first "new age" project to come out of Uruguay. Yet lumping Un Exceso De Luz into that most vast and heterogenous confluence of musical genres, akin to "world music," dismisses the alchemical breakdown of minimalism with gestures of contemporary jazz, exemplified by the shifting harmonic figures of "En Los Campos de Colonia" ("In the Fields of Colonia"). Pereyra and Roland sound strings in tandem, forming harmonic compositions that generate unexpected resonances. Together they build a climatic character that gives the sound of Ensamble Acústico its most distinctive seal, sharing more with the aesthetics of contemporary jazz than the nebulous new age label. The opening track "Cuando la Nostalgia Guía" ("When Nostalgia Guides") raises not a question so much as a provocation that hints at its own temporal limitations -- as an unfinished sentence. "Reposo de la Hierba" ("Repose of the Grass") meanders through grassy fields before "A Ras de Cielo" ("Flush With Sky") reveals the "Exceso" of the title track. These are the great ungroundings of modernity that saw the heavens open and dissolve the celestial sublime, leaving listeners with a godless excess of space and time. Perhaps "new age" is a more fortuitous classification than we originally suspected. As Roland says, "music is the expression of a new world." - Fresh Hold.
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.
