Infraction Records

Music:

Member Since: 1/22/2006
Band Website: infractionrecords.com
Band Members: Milieu, Aloof Proof, Tetsu Inoue, Koda, Andrew Liles, Kiln, Colin Potter, Beequeen, Zimiamvian Night, Zammuto, Ultra Milkmaids, Aidan Baker, Beautumn, Northern, Adam Pacione, Ourson, Darren Tate, Craig Bethell
Influences: Quiet, ambient, walk, sleep, listen.
Sounds Like: All prices postage-paid in the U.S. and Canada. Overseas, add $3 per disc for shipping.

CRAIG BETHELL - A Day Full of You, A Night Tired of Me CD (Infraction) U.S. $12.00 [INFX 026]
Out Now.
A Day Full Of You, A Night Tired Of Me is the debut album by ex-Locust vocalist, Craig Bethell. The album displays a plaintive song-writing style that unashamedly croons its way through a set of eleven varied tracks - influenced as much by avant-pop baritones Scott Walker and David Sylvian as it is by a troubled and melancholic Chet Baker. Bethell’s vocals are late night deliveries, a haunting idiom of the post-modern torch song.
Mark Van Hoen (Locust, Mojave 3, Sing Sing) lends production duties and evokes an atmosphere of ‘low’-era Bowie, (as on the instrumental overture of ‘December’), employs a careful use of Rhodes piano & subtle strings (‘Bad Blood’), as well as vintage synthesizer, distant harp motifs and brushed drums (‘Finding The Light’ & ‘History Repeats Itself’).
London based songwriter/singer Craig Bethell has sporadically written, recorded and performed his songs since 1983. His working life has largely been devoted to magazine publishing. Through demand from different quarters (die-hard Locust fans, new fans via MySpace etc.), Craig was encouraged to revisit the best of hitherto unreleased material from past sessions with Van Hoen. These works were revised, rerecorded, remixed and revamped, along with some completely new material, to make up A Day Full Of You, A Night Tired Of Me, an album many years in the making.
6 panel digipak, cover (‘Bundled’ 1925) courtesy of the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation.

ADAM PACIONE - From Stills to Motion CD (Infraction) U.S. $15.00 [INFX 023]
Highly anticipated new release from Adam Pacione. Deluxe packaging. Stoughton style mini-gatefold with 16 page full-color booklet. Design and layout by Pacione.
"An age of virtual audio saturation, of pre-articulated sound. Expressivity, once an array of possible voices, is ever more probabilized. Originality, once primary criterion, is cast from the platform, problematized. Wondering, late in modernity’s day, what does it take to make a noise that matters? A keen-eared recontextualizer, an alchemist who can make sound, found or unfound, to walk its own way, outside the ready-made parade. Adam Pacione is one such - new recruit to a group of like-minded musicians, kindred-spirits Brian Grainger (Milieu), Mike Bennett (Zimiamvian Night), and Kiln, who have brought the ferment from their sound stills to the Infraction table. That label is now streaming a vital strain of New Backwoods Ambient, this latest from deep in the heart of (Hurst) Texas – experimental, but harmonically-inclined, apparently lo-tech, but substantially audio-cratic.
Pacione’s distinction lies in drawing the vectors of several lines of musical enquiry into a trajectory which leads to a suggestive affective place. Witness how centrepiece track “Sodium Lit”, at outset a water-treading body-double for Andrew Deutsch’s Loops over Land, is slowly re-cast, a sonorous line drawn from Eno’s process drift towards Tim Hecker’s glitch ice-sculptures via Stars of the Lid’s downhome dronezone. It’s an illustration of how FSTM opens lacunae within itself, pulling the listener into its emergent sonic tableaux within which one’s feelings find their own projections. Echoes of the enviro-drone clan, low-lying labels like and/OAR, Twenty Hertz - old familiars of Infraction, the silhouettes of whose kinfolk – Keith Berry, Paul Bradley – are heard remotely. From Stills to Motion is evocative titling too, signalling dynamic, as on “Good Morning Mockingbird”, a near-static suspension of amorphous wisps finding flow from folding in further loopstrata and subtle drone infusions, snapshot morphing to moving picture. Sonority, then, shifts From Stills, gently tugged To Motion, into a woozy wonderland. Pacione starts from base material, conventional instruments, mainly guitars, the odd analog synth and sample, but no tone is left unturned. Like a tenderized but still chewy analog to recent Kranky fuzz-blur harmonizations, his source-sounds quietly exult in altered states - compressed, granularized, weathered, distressed... in a word (Pacione’s) “grexed”. Grex comes from cross-breeding – environment traits spun with the string-steel of source, further fleshing out, the familiar contour lent unfamiliar edge. A delicate and intricate weave results - a warp to the weft, dissonance offset by harmony, consonance subverted by pitch-bend. Basinski may have modelled the suggestivities of disintegration, mate Milieu pointed the emotive caché in sepia-stained sonorities, and Boards brothers the heart-swoop from modulating detune. Maybe a memory captured from The Caretaker’s Haunted Ballroom, whose dazed derangement of time-stretched timbres leaves traces on “Pinhole Sunrise”. No matter, for Pacione asserts proprietorship over these movements of liquid lilt that hum with out-tune. They come into being as if re-animated in slow melt from suspension, reaching “Zenith”, a 13-minute finale, which takes a twirl in tweaked timbre-land, then slowly lifts off, leaving hills, plains, and depths of earth, ending in ascent." (A.Lockett)

ZIMIAMVIAN NIGHT - Zimiamvian Night 2 CD (Infraction) U.S. $15.00 [INFX 014]
2.27.07. New Release! Limited to 300 copies.
2nd installment in the ever-lasting Zimiamvian Night series. Mike Bennett draws from the harmonium work of New Zealander Christopher Orczy's October release and configures an entirely new piece of ambient drone. A silent sky illuminated by northern lights. All the world is indeed frozen music.

TETSU INOUE - World Receiver CD (Infraction) $12.50 [INFX 015]
Nothing less than an ambient classic! World Receiver has been out of print for far too long. A damn near perfect blend of environmental recordings from literally all over the world with Inoue's nuanced atmospheres surrounding them. This will be an edition of 800 copies, featuring a 6 panel digipak. This is not remastered, retouched or remixed. It is superb as is, it needed no updating - only to be available again.

MILIEU - Beyond the Sea Lies the Stars CD (Infraction) U.S. $12.50

Contemplative ambient. Out now. Edition of 505. [INFX 018]
The rather profoundly titled 'Beyond The Sea Lies The Stars' from Milieu. This sounds well cinematic and is absolute chilled, floaty, spacey ambient bliss. This will make you feel like your floating in embryonic fluid and is absolutley gorgeous. This is produced by Brian Grainger and is on Infraction Records. This is my release of the week and if you don't buy it then you must be a bit chicken oriental. Stunning. Norman records

BEAUTUMN - Northing CD (Infraction) U.S.
$14.00 [INFX 020]
In stock now! Yes! New Beautumn. The debut Beautumn, "white coffee" is nearly sold out. We have this new full-length to keep us company.

NORTHERN - Drawn CD (Infraction) U.S. $14.00 [INFX 024]
New Release! Due out on May 20, 2007.
Debut release from Canada's Northern. Northern is all about clean digital samples and warm tones. northern is all about lovely guitar meanderings and skittering textures. Perhaps it is the frozen nature of Canada's landscape or the endearing dismay of the season's discontent that has transformed us. Winter reminds us all of polaroid pictures and places that exist only in dreams.

Preorder :ALOOF PROOF - Piano Text CD (Infraction) U.S. $14.00 [INFX 030]

Release date, late October/early November.
"There is no ambient record greater than Aloof Proof's Piano Text. I'm not the type of person given to grand, insupportable claims; this is simply a statement of fact. The album has equals, but no betters, and it is a tragedy that so few listeners have had the chance to hear this album in its entirety, let alone own a copy for themselves. It is the kind of album that becomes essential after just the first listen.
Since it was quietly released in 1994—a time, remember, dominated by the ambient-techno boom of such artists as the Orb and Future Sound of London—it has achieved a kind of cult status among fans of the genre. This is largely due to the edited versions of the album's two tracks that appeared on Asphodel's sprawling drone compilations, opening the world of Aloof Proof to thousands of eager listeners in the mid-nineties.
The overall sound of "The Ghost Ship" and "The Last Leaf" is simple to describe—the tones of a piano are stretched to the horizon line; long, lingering sounds, the fluttering threads of them in the wind, drifting like subtle perfumes, a dream language culled from a very familiar instrument. In its way, it is also a kind of Mandelbrot image—the briefest segments of the tracks can be listened to (like Eno's Neroli or Thursday Afternoon) to get an accurate idea of the whole. However, the magic of Piano Text is that, when taken as a duo of suites, the larger forms of the piece are revealed to be a classical composition of the utmost drama, suspense, nuance. It is, indeed, the music of the inexplicable dreamworlds we all travel to during sleep.
This is an album that must be listened to—no words can adequately describe how spellbinding the music is, how staggeringly elegant it is." B. Bieniowski
Remastered by Michael Fibe in 2006. This will be a 6 panel full color digipak release in an edition of 900.

Record Label: Infraction Records
Type of Label: Indie