Works by Music Area

"𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘯 the wind would stop blowing so hard. Kate watching a mist falling over the hills when they first arrived here, and running to tell her, it's history, to come and see history.”
—Ali Smith

“Nothing left but the fuzz ball, no more than that, nothing, nothing.”
—Juan Emar (tr. Megan McDowell)


In 1969, in Munich, Germany, Manfred Eicher founded the jazz label ECM Records. Over the next several decades, ECM put out records that, as much as they seemed to be normal jazz records—improvised ensemble recordings of acoustic and electric instruments—sounded more like studies, maybe even sculptures, of silence and space. You can always tell when you’re listening to an ECM record because all of the music seems to usher forth from an incredible stillness, like you might feel in a desert or the arctic. You may find yourself having to listen harder to an ECM record in order to discern its true character—otherwise it could come off as an impossibly smooth surface, a pebble in a riverbed, the texture of which reveals very little of the effort required to form it.

In 1984, ECM started putting out compilations of their artists’ various recordings for the label, all of them entitled Works, distinguishing them from “compositions” or “improvisations” and letting them linger somewhere in between intention and accident, hills shaped by time. Each edition of Works featured the same photograph of a foggy intersection at different exposures, sometimes appearing photorealistic and other times looking like a hologram of itself. In each photograph, the word “SLOW” is painted on the street ahead, as if encouraging the listener to take their time with the music, to take in its details gradually. To try to discern the shapes looming through the mist.

Last year, Chad Felix started collecting the Works series on cassette, and the result is the debut full-length release by Music Area. Performed by Felix, with additional mixing from Tyler McKusick, Works presents a series of phrases captured from the compilations, broken off from their sources, cut up and looped until formerly temporary passages of improvisation or composition become ghostly liminal spaces that you can get stuck in. In this new context, the sound of a trumpet could be mistaken for a kind of time-stretched birdsong. A guitar could sound like someone strumming the strings between atoms. A piano phrase could turn into a puncture in time, around which other sounds glitchily whirlpool.

What ultimately unites this sequence of everchanging loops, more than a shared record label or genre, is the feeling of being plunged into detail, as if they were very intensely zoomed-in paintings in an art textbook. Music becomes texture, sound becomes vibration. The world becomes whatever environment the listener has situated themselves in, its atoms suddenly visible, rearranging every instant. This isn’t music that necessarily transports you somewhere, takes you to a place you’ve never been before; it’s music that makes the familiar world appear alien and new.

Music Area
Spirits in the Dark
Empire of Hiss
Steward

THE THAW