Palace of Lights

"improvisations is the premiere recording by ang mo faux, a singapore-based trio. the two pieces presented here are essentially sonic explorations of software environments for live signal processing. in the case of "lobby", the software environment is...

“Marc Barreca and Kerry Leimer have worked on a nearly parallel musical course for more than forty years. Nearly parallel because their musical paths do occasionally cross. First in 1980 with "Four Pages From An Unfinished Novel" on K. Leimer's first solo album Closed System Potentials. Again during the live performance of Music For Land And Water and for the massive loop piece "Heart Of Stillness" from The Neo-Realist (At Risk) by the virtual group Savant.
Beyond basic file sharing, their recordings..

"Dual Mono is the third Barreca | Leimer collaboration. The process used for producing Dual Mono was designed to destabilize established habits and predilections in favor of responding to the music in at least subjectively new ways. It was also designed to reduce the illusion of control, to become more responsive to and accepting of unpredicted outcomes, and to give the music—as much as possible—a voice less tampered with...

"Marc Barreca's seventh solo album for Palace of Lights extends his work with a broader and deeper palette of synthesized and sampled sound, including sources as diverse as prepared guitars, pianos, Indonesian metallophones and glass harmonica. The music of Aberrant Lens employs long MIDI delays, synced MIDI processing via MAX for Live and extreme warping of disparate looped sound sources driven into entirely new states. The results are new, coherent aural structures: music that questions traditional...

“Marc Barreca's Recordings Of Failing Light explores the subatomic matter of ordinary instrument sounds. Pianos, glass percussion, guitars, and feedback are atomized through sampling and granular processing in search of the audio equivalent of a negative image. In the end, these granular elements became the beds and pads for elaborate extrapolations of deconstructed melodic, rhythmic, patterned, and forward-looking sound-and with the addition of analog sequencer and arpeggiator based textures, some....

“With Shadow Aesthetics, Marc Barreca accomplishes something rare in electronic and ambient musics. The fluid, dynamic changes and movement within pieces; the complexities in time and pitch variation and evolution—typically absent from the mostly homogenous constructs of drone and ambient—all bring previously unavailable depth, shading and emotional charges to a form usually admired for its neutrality.
Shadow Aesthetics results from a virtual arsenal of digital and analog sources operating in a...

"Composed with layers of computer processed, chopped and looped sounds including samples from field recordings, as well as studio recordings of accordion and other acoustic and electronic instruments Subterrane merges acoustic with electronic...

“With The Empty Bridge, Marc Barreca again exploits his distinct talent for translating landscapes into sound. The music was created in and reflects the influence of contrasting environments-the beauty and stillness of the Cascade Mountains and the muted industrial nightscape of the Duwamish Waterway, complete with it's massive, now-condemned, empty freeway bridge. The pieces are sculpted from layers of synthesized and sampled instruments, field recordings and processed vinyl. With these sources, Barreca...

"Comprised of nine settings that exhibit a nearly perpetual sense of instability, Marc Barreca’s Tremble shudders and grinds and shifts through aural spaces that collapse from highly detailed sound fields into massive densities, or expand into sheer...

Marc Barreca : digital synthesis, sampled sources, treatments and signal reprocessing
K. Leimer: analog and digital synthesis, electric guitar and bass, percussion, prepared piano, treatments and signal reprocessing.
Tyler Boley: guitars....

"The first collaborative work by Marc Barreca and K. Leimer since Savant. A hybridization of Barreca's "Tremble" and Leimer's "Permissions", Premap's 13 tracks coalesced from a huge number of individual sources, each produced as discrete, stand-alone...

In 2018, K. Leimer released a very good homage to 70s German Kosmiche musik on vinyl-only and NOT on Palace of Lights (I didn’t know about it either!).
This is a remixed and hugely expanded version of that album and released on CD for the first time!

"Leimer's love of kosmische is evident from the start, as "Dunne Luft" condenses the earmarks of that sound into it's four minutes. There's the solar flares of guitar that arise early on in the track, fuzzy and luminous, serving less as a lead...

“Found object is a loan translation from the French objet trouvé, describing art created from undisguised, but often modified, objects or products that are not normally considered materials from which art is made, often because they already have a non-art function.
Like the results from automatic writing and readymades, Found Objects offers an approximation of those techniques in sound by repurposing displaced phrases and timbres, pitches, restatements, and treatments as the root technique...

“Write. Record. Break. Recategorize. Reassemble.
In K. Leimer's most recent work, he returns to his long-running interest in developing relationships in sound that are not composed, not planned, not under conscious influence or control. Phrases and patterns emerge from dense layering and editing; melodic elements are split apart, re-voiced and reset in successive contexts. A music of distressed fragments, Spall originates from acoustic, electric, synthesized, manipulated, torn, and piece-work audio...

"These 10 new pieces by K. Leimer derive from sources and sessions from his prior CD, The Grey Catalog. With an interest in restating existing materials while exploring new methods for reshaping audio, The Pale Catalog uses completed stereo mixes of...

“K. Leimer's The Starting Errors serves as a handy index of catastrophes. The album documents the way in which the repetition of unexamined cultural behaviors spread as established-even acceptable-practice in the service of the few, no matter how damaging and destructive those practices prove. Music of conscience and consequence set within a general theme of things-gone-wrong, the album is built around a set of errors carefully indexed by the title track: a text-centric piece read by Tallula Bentley...

"Threnody by K. Leimer is a music of disorientation, error and loss. Free of any particular sense of continuity or structure, Threnody dwells in an absent-minded and forgetful state, inhabiting an aftermath of events too disorienting to be completely comprehended. Highly atmospheric, the music draws from influences as diverse as Arve Henriksen, David Sylvian, Taylor Deupree and Biosphere. Shattered phrases emerge among shrouded details in a state of sustained incompleteness. In a departure for Leimer...

“A Figure Of Loss takes K. Leimer's music into highly personal terrain. Written and recorded during two dark years, the resulting work hovers in proximity of a calm and placid consistency, tenuously balanced on expanding and contracting foundations. Built mostly around modeled and treated piano and digital synthesis, a sense of coherence emerged from piece to piece during the recording and editing process, yielding a sustained, but disturbed elegiac atmosphere, seemingly content to meditate on it's own...

"Leimer uses piano tape loops, moog synths, guitars and other things to weave his spells of tranquility. It's easy to compare him to Eno but it would be unfair to say that "CSP" is Enoesque because he gives it a quality that is entirely his own foundin...

"Extensively manipulated audio files, layered elements combined from multiple versions of shared sources, edited, reshaped envelopes and extended periods of dust collecting resulted in six pieces of minimalist / process music. Layered by arbitrarily...

"...K. Leimer creates similar sound mosaics, albeit with a greater dynamic range and rhythmic drive. He’s been putting out records since 1979 on his Palace of Lights label, sort of a Windham Hill of electronic music. As a Brian Eno disciple, Leimer is ...

"...K. Leimer creates similar sound mosaics, albeit with a greater dynamic range and rhythmic drive. He’s been putting out records since 1979 on his Palace of Lights label, sort of a Windham Hill of electronic music. As a Brian Eno disciple, Leimer is ...

"Written as a soundtrack for Alan Greenberg's documentary on the death and funeral of Bob Marley, the music for Land of Look Behind was produced in a little under two months. The music draws extensively on location recordings made for the film..

"A persistent favorite since its original release in 1982, Land of Look Behind has been remastered by Greg Davis, revealing new detail and depth in the studio and field recordings of this almost-soundtrack for the Alan Greenberg film of the funeral of...

Another handsomely packaged album of ambient music by this U.S. pioneer of the style.

"Lesser Epitomes is process music for active or passive listening. The pieces are derived from the aleatoric reordering of discreet, compatible musical...

"These things happen," says K. Leimer of LUYU. Listen Until You Understand is a test drive through an obstacle course designed for new instruments, arrangements, juxtapositions, and real-time experiments dedicated to leaving the original impulses untouched and unadorned. Joined at times by digital percussionist Dolphie Stein, the music throws itself against itself without loyalty to genre or form, mashing granular particles into a tremulous spectrum of soundwalls, transitions, noise, distortions, and the...

"Pursuing shorter forms, Permissions became a laboratory for creating pieces that verge on becoming somewhat traditional, recognizeable song forms that refuse to completely cohere, a sort of “disassembled music” technique Leimer had explored in the....

"K. Leimer, that neglected minimalist soundscaper is back with another smartly-packaged record, and it's a dandy, the sort of disc that begs the question as to why he isn't one of the Nobel Laureates of ambient already. Self-released on Leimer's own Pa...

"The Grey Catalog departs from Leimer’s typical obsessions with understatement and homogeneity to range freely across rhythmic, melodic, and disassembled forms. Incorporating percussion, electric guitar and bass as well as found sound, digital and...

Originally released in 2008, The Useless Lesson and Lesser Epitomes have been revisited, remixed, remastered and expanded with the 40-minute bonus EP Three Adaptations.

“Lesser Epitomes provides three short suites of music all composed using a system of chance to give shape to basic musical elements. The listener is then advised to randonly re-order them, creating a vast number of permutations within the set... as brief episodes of grouped strings move past each other with the stately...

"The spectre of Eno also looms over K. Leimer and his Palace of Lights crew from Seattle who make up Savant. Many of the same techniques are used, but instead of ritual trances, Savant has developed a pan-ethnic techno-dub music. Origins are blurred on...

“Chamber Music is an ongoing series of site-specific sound works made entirely from a single recording of the empty space in which they are presented. An hour of “silent” room tone is recorded when no people are in the building; this is heavily filtered to extract drones derived from the room’s resonant frequencies. This is the only sonic material used, and there is minimal electronic processing involved. Airforms was made in 2013 as a birthday gift for Steve Roden, who provided two hours of empty room...

"All of this music was either made for various collaborative projects, or eventually found its way into them. None of it is much like the work I usually do on my own, but this is why I enjoy working on assignment: externally imposed parameters lead to...

This is a beautifully packaged and presented album of a bit noisy and extremely cool ambient music. This was recorded in a single live performance in Madison, WI in 2006.

“Journeys are often recounted as though composed of a starting point, a goal, and an intervening distance-when that is often only half the story. What of the path between the destination and the point of origin, dotted with sights one didn't take in and courses that strayed from the known path? The return can be more circuitous, full of sideways steps and stop-offs at the distracting attractions once passed by on the way. Divagate provides the final segment of the trilogy begun by Gregory Taylor with...

I don't know anything about Taylor, but I gotta say that this is one of the very best ambient sound CDs I have heard in a very long time.

"dua_belas' title — Indonesian for “the twelve” — and tracknames hints at what awaits within before even...

“Peregrination is the centerpiece of a cycle that began with the release of Retinue (2019) and will find it's completion in a final recording yet to come. Where the universe described in Retinue is an expat's new home, Peregrination packs up, throws open the doors sets out on a pilgrimage whose immediate focus is found among the uncounted details discovered along the path of any and every journey. Built of rhythms, timbres, scales, and voices gathered from an imagined archipelago, Peregrination is...

The fourth album on Palace Of Lights by one of my very favorite sound / ambient 'sound constructors' out there.

"Randstad is a kind of hermetic diary of a year living in the randstad—a term the Dutch use to describe their own megalopolis that encompasses Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht. In its own way, the work runs contrary to today’s assumed absolute limitlessness of musical possibility, favoring a reduced expatriate sonic toolkit (composed of Cycling ’74’s Max, a modest Eurorack...

“The six extended pieces on Retinue had their beginning in a book on creating step sequencers using Max/MSP that Gregory Taylor wrote for Cycling ’74 after his return from the Netherlands (where his previous sonic diary Randstad was recorded). The development of the book’s materials was an opportunity to re-encounter his love for sequencing as practiced by the form’s early (Edgar Froese, Suzanne Ciani, Michael Hoenig) and later (Saul Stokes, Paul Ellis) practitioners and also to explore its connections...

“The origins of Three Point Circle go back to 1980, when K. Leimer, Marc Barreca, and Steve Peters met for two sparsely-attended shows in Olympia, WA. Some forty years later, they have regrouped as Three Point Circle.
Perhaps better described as a process than as a musical group, Three Point Circle has developed a collaborative system that replaces standards of improvisation and authorship with a new, independent, compositional identity removed from the individual habits and traits of the members...