Stadiums & Shrines

Brandon Locher on The Meets & Mazes to the Motherlode

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Brandon Locher - Mazes to the Motherlode 1
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Johnstown-based artist Brandon Locher commands a certain kind of organized chaos. He’s done this over a vast body of visual and musical work since 2006—all of which compile within the Locher co-founded creative collective My Idea of Fun. The two projects spotlighted today are his most current, and perhaps together both his most indirectly complimentary and contrasting. The Meets finds Brandon at the helm of a 20-person ensemble, directing and collaging an array of orchestral instruments and field recordings. Three years of sound went into It Happens Outside, a forthcoming LP. Mazes to the Motherlode finds Brandon deeply isolated, putting ink to paper, creating grayscale labyrinths of hyper-detail. Below, we get him going on the topic of each.

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Dreams of Algeria with Ricky Eat Acid

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Dreams of Algeria

 

Filling every cast of the veranda, bending every branch toward a smile, her voice greets the entrance of night. The drapes luff…

…the winding, narrow-terraced streets of Alger la Blanche idle beyond the window, a muted bloom. If not for this curtain’s dancing, that exquisite hum tracing the hillside, he thought, we’d be adrift in the middle of the Mediterranean.

And with another lapse of heavy lids: they are an island, untucked, reclining at sea… until the dawn converges.

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Ricky Eat Acid is the one and only Sam Ray. The piece above will soon join 14 others as Three Love Songs, Sam’s first release as Ricky Eat Acid since 2011’s excellent Seeing Little Ghosts Everywhere.

Hark

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Hark
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Whatever film London, Ontario artist Joshua Cwintal has in mind here, it is no doubt striking. While not an actual score, Hark does soundtrack a few slow-moving characters: “The Archivist” dwarfed in dusty halls of recorded history. “The Cartographer” hunched over a desk, meticulously modeling reality into spatial information. Then at the EP’s center is a cerebral (almost Reznor/Ross-ian) piano piece, capable of turning a casual listen into a scene itself.

Hark is available at bandcamp.

Atitlán

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Atitlán
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Once dubbed “the most beautiful lake in the world” by German explorer Alexander von Humboldt and “too much of a good thing” by author (and LSD enthusiast) Aldous Huxley, Lago de Atitlán draws many eyes to the Guatemalan Highlands. Baltimore artist Rod Hamilton responded to its pull last summer, and while there composed a collection of crystalline xylophone psychedelia titled Atitlán. The tape makes curious use of track names; “Treppe 3” opens, “Prelude 1” closes, and so on. It’s a code we’re yet to translate, but are having a delightful time in the process. “Dance 1-4” does in fact have four sections, each activated when a new element enters the mix. The piece assembles into carbonated splendor—one not unlike the hypnosis we’d love to imagine follows a deep stare into the blues of Lago de Atitlán.

The album is available at bandcamp.