Halides

This new DVD from the Root Strata camp features "Hand processed & solarized" super-8 film by John Davis, set to musical accompaniment from a duo of Davis with Maxwell August Croy. This audio-visual project was projected live to improvised sounds at last year's On Land Music Festival at the Swedish American Hall, San Francisco, and is replicated here as a seventeen minute flow of abstract, analogue sound sculpting and scratchy old film. In terms of visual imagery, Davis begins by homing in on close-ups of small details from the natural world, paying particular attention to dew drops collecting on cobwebs or leaves. In its earliest stages, the music tends not to be nearly so bucolic as the imagery, beginning with a fearsome, raw blast of oscillator buzz before simmering itself down into a more composed and tranquil soundscape that yields ample low-end presence and a general demeanour of haziness. This all nicely settles into harmony with the gauzy, vintage film stock. Loaded with a striking sense of faux-nostalgia, the film is at its richest when capturing the interplay between golden, evening sunlight and long grasses, or lakeside foliage. The whole experience feels like a day-trip for the senses, a notion only reinforced by the piece's final sequence, as captured from the window of a train - at this point it's as if you're coming home. The music has a powerful presence in its own right, calling upon electric guitar and electronics - all processed into nebular, drifting shapes - but when attached to Davis' flow of light-saturated visuals the overall effect takes on a life of its own, spilling warmth from every frame. - Boomkat

A beautiful document from last year's On Land festival, the Root Strata curated gathering of artists and sound artists and musicians. This particular set featured gorgeous home solarized super-8 film shot by John Davis throughout Northern California, while Davis and Maxwell Croy, one half of the duo that runs Root Strata, created their own complimentary soundtrack, a soft hazy dronescape of bowed strings, layered vibrations and hushed, barely-there melodies. The images are really quite evocative, all washed out and softly distorted, like home movies, they have that sort of faded memory feeling, images of a lost time, and the solarizing process only further enhances that element, the slow shifting landscapes peppered with solar flares, deep red glows, the colors super saturated, flowers become miniature suns, fields of grass look like stained glass, or fields of green stars, all manner of foliage becomes more about texture and color, just softly swaying stretches of hazy burnt out shades of soft white, deep yellow, warm browns... And the music perfect suits the images, tranquil and impressionistic, long tones underpin soft shards of melody, like a muted raga, the buzz blurred and smoothed out into gauzy streaks of sound, a koto gives the music a distinctly Eastern vibe, the tones like swells on a sonic sea, meditative and mesmerizing.
LIMITED TO 120 COPIES! Housed in a cool oversized hand silkscreened jacket, with a printed insert and a strange accordion like inner dvd-sleeve. - Aquarius Records