Description
One day in early 2004 I arrived home to find the biggest parcel I had ever received sitting on my doorstep, it was crudely wrapped and covered in stamps. I was amazed that anyone would POST something like this through the regular mail system.
I brought it inside and cut away the packaging. To my astonishment I found that it contained a large old ‘Orla’ chord organ and a letter from Marcel Bear (Empirical) saying that he had noted my recent enthusiasm for organ tones (see also With Throats As Fine As Needles and Sunken…).
He had found this one at a garage sale and thought that I might like it. My interest in organs had been at least in part inspired by my reading about Charlemagne Palestine and his concept of the “Golden Music”. His idea of a stream of sound that may facilitate an ecstatic bliss of religious intensity has been hugely influential to me (in much the same way as Haino’s ‘sound of the universe’…).
I decided pretty much straight away that I would record an album using this organ as the predominant sound source (the only other sound sources are the field recordings of rain on the 1st track and scaffolding pipes on the 2nd).
As the recordings progressed from the straight ahead drone of the 1st track I stripped away more and more unnecessary components of the machine until on the last track I was bowing and plucking the spring pegs of the keys. One of my favourite sounds was that of the fan motor itself.
Anthony Milton
