SACRUM ABBEY DISTORTIONS
"Mat and I first met on the evening of Monday the 31st of August 2009.
He was at The Old Bar in Fitzroy, sitting on the stage beside a pile of
compact discs, a Pioneer CDJ and a RC20XL Loop Station. I had just
watched him perform as Grist. I was new to Melbourne and had recently
begun the Sisyphean task of writing experimental music reviews for Beat
magazine, but soon realised that it was much more rewarding to
participate in sonic exploration than it was to just observe it.
This encounter led to Gnaumgn, which has always been about entering into a potential space of free sonic play. Whether it was crunchy distorted guitars or screeching violins or bash and clash percussion or kazoos or just random stuff being hit against other random stuff, it was all recorded and mined at a later date for those sections of undulation from chaos to synchronicity that collapse into chaos again.
The first album we released as Gnaumgn was 'Bostrau Asterid Symbicon', a title that came to me in a dream. There are many ways to break the syllables down into smaller chunks of discernible meaning, but when brought together in their tripartite compound format they seemed to capture the spirit of disinhibition and defamiliarisation we both valued.
Thanks to this shared value, Gnaumgn has continued for over a decade, punctuating that time with twenty eight albums showcasing divergent music making strategies form black metal ambience and free jazz ecstasy, to home-made electronics and junk percussion mountain, to the more recent forays into domesticore necessitated by the Melbourne-Cape Paterson divide in general and our present day global health crisis in particular.
At the ten year mark we have reflected on our musical partnership and it seemed like a good chance to articulate this reflective period into a creative methodology. So, what we decided to do was to go back to the deepest dustiest corners of Gnaumgn's digital vault, exhume the B.A.S. recordings, and respond to each of them using our present day imaginations from the vantage point of our own living spaces. For example, I would create a new layer of sound for "Spatialised Experiential Listening" and so would Mat, but we wouldn't know what each other was adding until we removed the original track and synchronised our two new tracks, creating a brand new track. We repeated this process for every track on 'Bostrau Asterid Symbicon', once again welcoming a variety of compositional strategies, eventually coming up with 9 brand new tracks inspired by the now omitted B.A.S. list, in the manner of a palimpsest.
We had every intention of releasing this new collection, some of which work spookily well, which brought with it the need to say a few words about the process of its production, about how Gnaumgn exists as a generous conglomeration of sonic curiosities. At first I thought it might be difficult to adequately capture what ten years of Gnaumgn means to me in just a few words, but I was wrong.
When I listen to all the music Mat and I have made together, all the jams and the gigs and the remote listening challenges full of street noise and clock ticks and the sonic traits of chair legs, the thing I hear most of all is our friendship. For me, Gnaumgn is an ever evolving sonic document of a creative conversation between two people that is conducted using alternative voicings that may or may not result in music. In this sense, music is irrelevant; what's important is the conversation, and that it shall continue."
- DAVID PRESCOTT-STEED, 2020
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"in 2010, David Prescott-Steed asked me if we should form a band. Gnaumgn was formed (initially called "Aumgn", from the Crowleyian spelling of the magickal sound "om", but then it was discovered that there was already a noise band from melbourne called "Aumgn", so we changed it - the resulting word pronounced "nom").
the first album - Bostrau Asterid Symbicon - was a messy distorted cyclone of flying detritus, generated by freejazz / grindcore drumming, noisy sweeping fedback guitars, and screeching violins - the first exuberant expressions of the unrestrained sound-love and total noise-freedom that GNAUMGN has now been doing for a decade.
for THIS album, we decided to celebrate our ten years by taking the first album, and using that as a template/score for the composition of this new album - we each independently (in self-isolation) recorded a new layer for each of the tracks on Bostrau Asterid Symbicon, then put them together. no other rules were discussed. so each of the pieces on the new album are exactly the length of the pieces on the first album, and are dictated by the forms / shapes / sounds / dynamics of the original tracks, but are actually formed by completely non-interacting layers recorded 154 kilometres away from each other - parallel layers anchored by recordings we made a decade ago. in this way, time and space are bent by occult means, the old becomes the new, and the cycle of decade becomes a sonic ouroboros, and GNAUMGN eats its own tail.
the result is, of course, that the album Sacrum Abbey Distortions can be played at the exact same time as Bostrau Asterid Symbicon, offering additional frequencies and textures and coincidences, a Pink Floyd meets Wizard of Oz situation that is in fact completely deliberate instead of just stoner delusion. as such, we've added a bonus track to downloads of this release, which is just this album layered over the first album, as one long piece, exactly synched up. (Sacrum Abbey Distortions is of course an anagram of Bostrau Asterid Symbicon, and nearly all the song titles refer to the original song titles on Bostrau Asterid Symbicon.)
GNAUMGN has always been a celebration of the sounds we make with a certain intention, rather than certain instruments or within a certain genre - to "GNAUMGN" is more of a verb than a noun - and i intend on GNAUMGNing as long into the future as we possibly can. it's a project with no limits, complete sound anarchy, where the freedom to mistake is not only encouraged but necessary.
here's to another decade! <3"
- A DEMON SHEEN, 2020
This encounter led to Gnaumgn, which has always been about entering into a potential space of free sonic play. Whether it was crunchy distorted guitars or screeching violins or bash and clash percussion or kazoos or just random stuff being hit against other random stuff, it was all recorded and mined at a later date for those sections of undulation from chaos to synchronicity that collapse into chaos again.
The first album we released as Gnaumgn was 'Bostrau Asterid Symbicon', a title that came to me in a dream. There are many ways to break the syllables down into smaller chunks of discernible meaning, but when brought together in their tripartite compound format they seemed to capture the spirit of disinhibition and defamiliarisation we both valued.
Thanks to this shared value, Gnaumgn has continued for over a decade, punctuating that time with twenty eight albums showcasing divergent music making strategies form black metal ambience and free jazz ecstasy, to home-made electronics and junk percussion mountain, to the more recent forays into domesticore necessitated by the Melbourne-Cape Paterson divide in general and our present day global health crisis in particular.
At the ten year mark we have reflected on our musical partnership and it seemed like a good chance to articulate this reflective period into a creative methodology. So, what we decided to do was to go back to the deepest dustiest corners of Gnaumgn's digital vault, exhume the B.A.S. recordings, and respond to each of them using our present day imaginations from the vantage point of our own living spaces. For example, I would create a new layer of sound for "Spatialised Experiential Listening" and so would Mat, but we wouldn't know what each other was adding until we removed the original track and synchronised our two new tracks, creating a brand new track. We repeated this process for every track on 'Bostrau Asterid Symbicon', once again welcoming a variety of compositional strategies, eventually coming up with 9 brand new tracks inspired by the now omitted B.A.S. list, in the manner of a palimpsest.
We had every intention of releasing this new collection, some of which work spookily well, which brought with it the need to say a few words about the process of its production, about how Gnaumgn exists as a generous conglomeration of sonic curiosities. At first I thought it might be difficult to adequately capture what ten years of Gnaumgn means to me in just a few words, but I was wrong.
When I listen to all the music Mat and I have made together, all the jams and the gigs and the remote listening challenges full of street noise and clock ticks and the sonic traits of chair legs, the thing I hear most of all is our friendship. For me, Gnaumgn is an ever evolving sonic document of a creative conversation between two people that is conducted using alternative voicings that may or may not result in music. In this sense, music is irrelevant; what's important is the conversation, and that it shall continue."
- DAVID PRESCOTT-STEED, 2020
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"in 2010, David Prescott-Steed asked me if we should form a band. Gnaumgn was formed (initially called "Aumgn", from the Crowleyian spelling of the magickal sound "om", but then it was discovered that there was already a noise band from melbourne called "Aumgn", so we changed it - the resulting word pronounced "nom").
the first album - Bostrau Asterid Symbicon - was a messy distorted cyclone of flying detritus, generated by freejazz / grindcore drumming, noisy sweeping fedback guitars, and screeching violins - the first exuberant expressions of the unrestrained sound-love and total noise-freedom that GNAUMGN has now been doing for a decade.
for THIS album, we decided to celebrate our ten years by taking the first album, and using that as a template/score for the composition of this new album - we each independently (in self-isolation) recorded a new layer for each of the tracks on Bostrau Asterid Symbicon, then put them together. no other rules were discussed. so each of the pieces on the new album are exactly the length of the pieces on the first album, and are dictated by the forms / shapes / sounds / dynamics of the original tracks, but are actually formed by completely non-interacting layers recorded 154 kilometres away from each other - parallel layers anchored by recordings we made a decade ago. in this way, time and space are bent by occult means, the old becomes the new, and the cycle of decade becomes a sonic ouroboros, and GNAUMGN eats its own tail.
the result is, of course, that the album Sacrum Abbey Distortions can be played at the exact same time as Bostrau Asterid Symbicon, offering additional frequencies and textures and coincidences, a Pink Floyd meets Wizard of Oz situation that is in fact completely deliberate instead of just stoner delusion. as such, we've added a bonus track to downloads of this release, which is just this album layered over the first album, as one long piece, exactly synched up. (Sacrum Abbey Distortions is of course an anagram of Bostrau Asterid Symbicon, and nearly all the song titles refer to the original song titles on Bostrau Asterid Symbicon.)
GNAUMGN has always been a celebration of the sounds we make with a certain intention, rather than certain instruments or within a certain genre - to "GNAUMGN" is more of a verb than a noun - and i intend on GNAUMGNing as long into the future as we possibly can. it's a project with no limits, complete sound anarchy, where the freedom to mistake is not only encouraged but necessary.
here's to another decade! <3"
- A DEMON SHEEN, 2020
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