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Rvng International

SAVANT - Artificial Dance

The story of electronic music pioneer Kerry Leimer continues with a focus on his auteurist studio project Savant.


Compiling the standalone album, 1983s The Neo Realist (At Risk), with Savants debut 12″ and a grip of compilation and unreleased tracks, Artificial Dance documents Leimers complete collaborative venture into the unpredictable realities of music, exploring the gulf between what is expected by its creators and what is eventually – and eternally – committed to tape.
Savant was designed by Leimer to tap into entropic truths, asserting an uncaged counterpart to the loop-based minimalism he produced in isolation (recently surveyed on RVNG Intl.s A Period of Review (1975-1983)). Aligning himself with the Cage-ean principles of chance operations and musical contingency, Savant was a band sans jam. Allegorically, a blindfolded collaboration whose happenstance source music Leimer would sample, loop and sculpt at will.


Leimer was creatively autonomous to the point of being a persona absentia in Seattles 80s rock scene. Unconcerned by social status, Leimer enlisted musicians from experimental and post-punk groups in the area to come record as Savant at his home studio, Tactical. Among them were ambient composer Marc Barreca, John Foster (founder of Op Magazine – the experimental music publication), Jim and David Keller of the New Flamingos, and their bandmate Alex Petit. Others, like Roy Finch and Dennis Rea, came from a similar orbit.
Even with these musicians at his beck and call, Leimer implemented a disarming musical strategy. Savant would have no fixed line up and often musicians would be asked to play instruments far outside their forté. Leimer would however give loose rhythmic direction for the musicians to develop spontaneously against click-tracks. When the performance locked in with Leimer listening at the controls, hed capture it to tape. These moments became the soul of Savant and the combustive elements that would variegate its timbres.


Savant tonally operates in a space between This Heats dark primitivism and the found sound collage of Brian Eno & David Byrnes My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. These analogies are simply stylistic, as the narrative behind The Neo-Realists production makes clear Leimer was concocting via more alchemic means, avoiding genre aspirations by looking for accidental moments of musical intrigue and discovery. Leimer explains this process in the collections liner notes: “I was looking for flaws, for faults to act as the stand-out features of the music.”


Far from a provisional stab at avant-garde sensibilities, Savant represents Leimers repudiation of ambient musics passive side. Artificial Dance embodies a perfectionists family portrait of outré musicians conforming to Leimers nonconformist musical ethos. Fitting for its name, Leimer created conditions for asocial brilliance with Savant, materializing an outward offering from an inward studio and a collaboration of audacious invention.


Savants Artificial Dance is available now as double LP set, CD, and digitally. Extensive liner notes and artist interviews were overseen by Aaron Leitko. The collection was assembled by RVNG and K. Leimer, who continues making music to this day. - Rvng International.
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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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