Digital composition from the guitarist for long-standing trio San Agustin (previous releases available through Road Cone, Family Vineyard and Table of the Elements). The understated improvisational nature of that group's work filters through in the deceptively random-generated feel of these carefully treated field recordings from the southern United States and New Mexico. Everyday occurrences are recreated and recast in a shimmering, scraping fogbank of sound that approximates something like the oblique process of memory. Operating alongside the loose boundaries of composers such as Brandon LaBelle and Bernhard Günter, David Daniell brings a richness and depth of field to this compositional style from his other playing situations, surpassing the genre to find something personal and unique.
"If it's initially difficult to identify these two pieces as based on location recordings, you may just have to take David Daniell's word for it. But whether or not these pieces aurally signify the times and locations specified in their titles, they do speak to a steely-unto-meditative concentration and an obsession with the irreducibility of individual sound events—the non-identity of the similar. All of which moves... gradually, gracefully... to conclude in an earthy layer of strings. These are largely abstract landscapes in which space is a blessed given."
"The tonal modulations give a nocturnal touch to this work that sometimes is close to Steve Roden's 'Crop Circles' for the mantra-like quality of the sounds, for the meditative dimension of the percussive effects and of the background interferences suspended between silence and small sonic events."
"David Daniell uses carefully treated field recordings along the highways or roads from the southern United States and New Mexico, to come up with two long compositions in which carefully and gracefully interwoven soundscapes play the major part... the soundlevel is very low and the changes are minimal, which gives the listener the impression of great distances and large abstract landscapes."
"A complete and hermetic audio environment is achieved within the extremely rewarding sonic detritus to be found on sem. These two complementary pieces contain the kind of compositional moves made only by the obsessive and the obsessed. Each new listen reveals detail and motion not noticed the previous time. A very gentle provocation; a very musical non-music."
