Smucker’s Personae represents its own world, seducing the listener into its sources of contemplation and reverie. —David Saemann, review of Personae
Michael Ash
Arianna Cavalensi
26 January 2024: Release of Breathing Landscape on Beacon Sound
Breathing Landscape will be released on the label Beacon Sound on 26 Jan 2024
Breathing Landscape was included in Bandcamp’s “Best Experimental Music of February 2024
Recorded in an abandoned water tank in rural northwest Colorado and inspired by Muriel Rukeyser’s circa 1935 poem of the same name, violinist Leslee Smucker explores the range and saturation of intense natural reverb on Breathing Landscape. The artist pushes her instrument to the limit by turns percussive, sweeping, and scraping and, on several tracks, utilizes her own voice as well, resulting in an album that combines breathtaking beauty and visceral texture. Leaning into the meditative quality being present in one moment can provide, this is music you can feel on your skin, calling out from our decomposing modernity into the indifferent sky above. Conjuring deep time but captured in one day, the album is simultaneously immediate and vaporous, primeval sounding yet unapologetically modern.
Press about Breathing Landscape:
““continuing underground” has an edge, finding beauty within friction and setting it free to float the distance.” -Brad Rose, Foxy Digitalis
