Leslee Smucker

to be Released by Beacon Sound on 26 Jan 2024

Buy album on Bandcamp

"My artistic work deals with sound fidelity, spatial practices (in both live and electroacoustic works), ancient aesthetics, and non-linear narratives. I involve electronics, found sounds, natural sounds, and acoustic instruments like violin and voice. I am interested in listening circularly; focusing on how sound sources move through space and enclose us, and each unique temporal iteration of the source. While considering an array of sonic sources, my projects oscillate and teeter between electronic, natural, and acoustic." – Leslee Smucker

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.

When you travel out of the mountains down into the rangelands of what we know today as western Colorado, the horizon opens up to reveal an ancient and scarred land. Cell phone coverage is spotty at best and towns are sparse. Time escapes our efforts to contain it and is instead etched into the hot, dry canyons. Approaching The Tank, outside the settlement of Rangely, oil pumps work ceaselessly on the other side of the gravel road, extracting a grim future. Inside The Tank it is 20 degrees warmer than outside, a zone of strange harmonics, exchanges of sound and stillness, and explorations of landscapes both exterior and interior. In what she describes as a "sauna of sound", Smucker "was transported by the reverberation to another realm. Birds and trucks passed outside, while the wind was an integral part to the sound making."

Credits:

Composed and Performed by Leslee Smucker

Engineered by Samantha Wade and Michael Van Wagoner

Mastered by Jason Powers

Graphic Design by Studio Bernhardt

Cover artwork by Leslee Smucker

Hypnotic Traces is an exploratory album for violin, voice, organ, and antique music boxes. Based around Cage’s Six Melodies for violin and keyboard instrument, the recording utilizes organ instead of the traditional piano. Framed around these six melodies are collages of left over and manipulated sound from the recording process, reflecting a friendship with each adjoining melody. To finish the album, Henry Brant’s Quombex for viola d’amore, organ, and music boxes employs a unique chance-melody conglomeration, with the antique music boxes playing together, the organ lazily playing chorales, and the viola d’amore in scordatura harmonic melodies.

Booklet Notes, SoundCloud

Deliquescent is an album that uses violin, voice, tapes, found objects, and a 0-coast synth. It’s about degradation, water, deterioration, and generation loss. (or millennial dread)