Search - K. Leimer :: The listening room

K. Leimer
The listening room
Genres: Dance & Electronic, Special Interest

Track Listings (3) - Disc #1
1. Circle of grey
2. Teeming solitude
3. Body of the beloved

CD Details

All Artists: K. Leimer
Title: The listening room
Members Wishing: 1
Total Copies: 0
Label: Palace of Lights
Original Release Date: 2/15/2002
Release Date: 2/15/2002
Genres: Dance & Electronic, Special Interest
Style: Electronica
Number of Discs: 1
SwapaCD Credits: 1
UPC: 634479285479

Synopsis

Product Description

Kerry Leimer's first new album since Imposed Order, his stated goal here is to create "an intricate quiet". The most solidly ambient of all his work, The listening room features three long pieces which become successively more complex and more structured. Beginning with the "self-deterministic" loops of Circle of grey and ending with the deliberately structured string trio that closes Body of the beloved, the music of The listening room spirals around meditations of endings, tracing a linear evolution in slow, melancholic steps. "As pure, unadulterated ambient music, Leimer's new disc The Listening Room acquits itself admirably, a plaintive, resonant balance of questing tones and beauteous drones that is a cousin in many respects to Steve Roach's Quiet Music. Both recordings drink deep of spartan, contemplative moods, and both successfully invoke remembrance, yearning, reflection and melancholy - warm, lovely, the sensibilities on display here resolve themselves in a studied, even 'classical' manner. Then on Brittle Soft, his other 2002 outing, Leimer mixes his metaphors with guitarist Tyler Boley, whose echoes of Richard Pinhas burnishes the icy-smooth surfaces with a markedly chrome sheen. It appears Leimer's migrating from formerly translucent territory; this is ambient with teeth." ? Darren Bergstein, e/i

CD Reviews

Come Into The Light

Robert Carlberg | Seattle | 05/13/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"After a nearly 20-year layoff from music, Leimer returns to a place not so far from where he was last sighted. Utilizing slow loops, repeating patterns and automatic processes set against each other, he creates a low-key ambient synthesizer album full of hidden complexity.

Each of the three pieces is based on a different paradigm.

"Circle of Grey" floats a series of muted, modal synthesizer phrases, letting them drift in and out of alignment. The result is as languid as dust motes in July.

"Teeming Solitude" adds piano and discreet percussion to explore three examples of 'process music' where patterns emerge from coincidence. Rather than the benign neglect of "Circle," here the composer sets collision courses and waits for traces to illuminate the results.

"Body of the Beloved" is a set of classical variations on an ambient theme, where gentle phrases are repeated, mutated and reiterated in a slow fugue-state. It is the busiest, most-varied and most accomplished of the three suites.

The concept of a "listening room" of course implies that, by setting up ideal acoustics and removing distractions, music will somehow become an object of study, a pursuit under a microscope, an intellectual adventure. The truth is music is a visceral experience, felt more in your guts than in your brain. If you can't enjoy it in the car, over breakfast or in a club then no amount of formalizing it will bring it into focus for you."