Building a movement Vol. 2 | Gabriel Solomon

Physical copies still available via

-Boomkat (UK/EU): bit.ly/2NMf8RS

– Forced exposure (USA): bit.ly/2OeFkUh

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Shelter Press announces the release of the second volume in Gabriel Saloman’s “Making Movement” series, continuing the publication of original compositions commissioned for works of contemporary dance. Following his enthusiastically received first release – the volume of The Disciplined Body – Saloman offers 5 new tracks that combine shimmering guitar strings and reverberating acoustic percussion in a meditative and powerful departure from anything he’s produced before. Mobilizing the frequencies of contemporary electronic music (fine-tuned to speaker clanking effect by Helmut Erler at Berlin’s Dubplates & Mastering), Movement Building vol. 2 abandons the conventional instrumentation and genre motifs embraced by many of its peers in favor of a wholly unique hybrid of avant-drone, psych- rock and Japanese traditional music.

In 2013, the dance company 605 Collective from Vancouver, Canada engaged Gabriel Saloman to collaborate on a dance piece commissioned by the experimental performance company Theater Replacement. The two-year process resulted in a full-length immersive multimedia dance performance, The Sensationalists (2015), a study of affect and intensity that focuses on an imagined secret society dedicated to the collective creation of autonomous sensory meridian response, or ASMR. A perceptual phenomenon that can be produced by a combination of sensual and cognitive stimuli, devotees of ASMR have produced thousands of YouTube videos tailored to provide these sensations. In composing the music for The Sensationalists, Saloman built on years of exploring the outer limits of frequency and volume with his former group Yellow Swans and produced a series of songs that cemented the live performance and sent waves of sensation through the audience.

An early inspiration for The Sensationalists and the music collected in Movement Building Vol. 2 was the novel Snowland by Yasunari Kawabata. The classic 1956 Japanese novel tells the story of a geisha in a small mountain town and her married and wealthy male lover (a self-taught musician and self-proclaimed expert in Western ballet). Their tragic love affair, set amidst snow, hot springs and mountains, became the thematic and contextual source for the early stages of the project, resulting in much of the music on this album.

Borrowing compositionally and tonally from Taiko and Gagaku (ancient drone-based imperial court music), Saloman reproduced sounds derived from traditional Japanese drums, wind and string instruments almost entirely on guitar, ride cymbals and snare drum. This influence is most explicit in the undulating rhythms that open the first side of St. 2 (Contained Battle/Ascend) and the layered escalation literally named Gagaku, a methodical combination of rhythm and drone that climbs to a climax of psych-tinged searing guitar lines. In between these songs are Ear Piercer and Mountain Music, two songs that have been a staple of Saloman’s incredibly intense live sets for the past two years.

The album’s conclusion is a version of Miles Davis’ classic ballad, My Funny Valentine. This epilogue of sorts is an amazing combination of original percussion and guitar, collaged together with what could be live footage of Davis’ “second great quintet” ripped from YouTube, processed and time-stretched to tape. Conceived as a support for a duet that interprets a shambolic, drunken encounter between the protagonists of Snow Land, the piece provides a cool denouement after the drawn-out intensities of what preceded it.

This second part of what will resolve to be a trilogy (look for Vol. 3 in 2016), Movement Building Vol. 2 is somewhat of a departure from most of what Saloman has released before. Just as his previous album combined cinematic atmospheres with guitar highlights that easily appeal to fans of neoclassical experimentalism and post-rock informed drone, this record opens up new compositional territory while maintaining a recognizable melancholic atmosphere. Exposure to the monolithic bass and open spaces of dub-influenced EDM took Saloman in a different direction than many of his peers (including artists like Cut Hands, Vatican Shadow and former bandmate Pete Swanson) and towards something that moves bodies and moves their nerves of endings, but without concessions to the dance floor.

Mastered and cut by Elmut Herler at D+M (Berlin) and released in a limited edition of 500 copies worldwide.