Search - Loren Mazzacane Connors & Alan Licht :: Hoffman Estates

Loren Mazzacane Connors & Alan Licht
Hoffman Estates
Genres: Alternative Rock, Jazz, Special Interest, Pop, Rock

Track Listings (7) - Disc #1
1. Slowly, Slowly, Slowly
2. Block That Nixon
3. Sad at Times
4. Wisdom Day
5. Peace Scare
6. Turner's Murder
7. And Everyone 'Neath Their Vine and Fig Tree Shall Live in Peace ...

CD Details

All Artists: Loren Mazzacane Connors & Alan Licht
Title: Hoffman Estates
Members Wishing: 0
Total Copies: 0
Label: Drag City
Release Date: 11/30/1998
Genres: Alternative Rock, Jazz, Special Interest, Pop, Rock
Styles: Avant Garde & Free Jazz, Experimental Music, Progressive, Progressive Rock
Number of Discs: 1
SwapaCD Credits: 1
UPC: 781484015123

Synopsis

Amazon.com

Alan Licht and Loren Mazzacane-Connors's previous releases have drawn from the guitarists' improvisational performances, but on the sublime Hoffman Estates they abandoned both live recording and the duo format. Instead the two New Yorkers traveled to a studio in suburban Hoffman Estates, Illinois, where jack-of-all-trades Jim O'Rourke (Gastr Del Sol, Tony Conrad, Faust, Smog) recorded each guitarist's encounter with the cream of Chicago's musical underground. Then O'Rourke, in conscious emulation of producer Teo Macero's role on Miles Davis's In a Silent Way and Get Up with It, assembled the album's tracks by doubling, looping, and adding to the original performances. On "Wisdom Day" a cascade of brass fanfares pours over Licht's richly textured feedback drones; Connors's weeping, tremolo-laden guitar leads stalk through the aptly titled "Slowly, Slowly, Slowly" shadowed by a deliberate acoustic bass before dissolving into a cascade of dolorous clarinets. --Bill Meyer

CD Reviews

Hoffman Estates: Here (Comes) Everybody

David Kipp | Melbourne, Australia | 10/26/1999

(4 out of 5 stars)

"On first listening, Hoffman Estates is a dense, gloomy affair: tangled guitar drones superimposed upon which are edgy brass and woodwind motifs. On repeated listening, however, something huge and darkly beautiful materialises out of the murk. Here can be found a body of work that bears a strange resemblance the sleeping giant of Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" - a brooding, titanic figure deep in slumber, threatening to wake but never (except for an almighty, adenoidal snore in the grumbling, roaring "Turner's Murder") quite reaching full consciousness.Alan Licht and Loren Mazzacane-Connors have colluded with Chicago ur-producer Jim O'Rourke and a cast of prolific musicians of the same turf to produce a truly grand record. The guitar work of Licht and Mazzacane-Connors is a revelation, spanning the elegiac, faintly distorted lines of "Slowly, Slowly, Slowly" and "And Everyone 'Neath Their Vine and Fig Tree Shall Live in Peace and Unafraid" and the blaring siren call of "Turner's Murder", while the brass and woodwind lines become more gloriously manifest with each listening. Play this record while dozing and be conveyed (slowly, slowly, slowly) into a world of giant dark dreams."