OFFICE SUITES
ERNIE ALTHOFF & A DEMON SHEEN
The sounds of office furniture - rarely the source of musical inspiration. But Ernie Althoff is no ordinary man. When he heard the clatterings and scrapings and thuddings of his new desk chair - many years ago now - he decided to record them.
Many years later, Ernie decided to see if anyone else he knew might be inspired by the unexpected musicalities of his seemingly-unremarkable furniture. As luck would have it - or is it fate? - A Demon Sheen is also no ordinary man, and leapt upon the chance to duet with Ernie's chair-recordings, accompanying these ancient sound artifacts with a variety of stringed instruments in his care: acoustic guitar, electric wah-wah pedal saz, prepared acoustic guitar, guzheng, and electric distorted guitar.
Then A Demon Sheen discovered a piece of vocoding software, and experimented with vocoding the stringed instrument recordings with the chair recordings - an experiment that was not entirely successful, but successful enough to be snipped up and re-inserted by Ernie back into the original chair-and-strings duets.
They named this first Suite of chair-and-strings recordings
DIVERSITY IN THE WORKPLACE.
While Ernie played with even more ancient field recordings of electronic relay stations, A Demon Sheen experimented more with this vocoder idea, this time using the chair recordings to vocode some more sustained sounds created with his harmonium. This experiment was far more successful, and, once overlaid with various field recordings taken from both the Althoff and Demon Sheen archives, this Suite of harmonium-vocoded-with-chairs pieces became
THE SHAPE OF CHAIRS.
With Ernie's multiple-surround-chairs-meets-relay-station experiment serving as an interlude between Suites, the release was ready. And here it is, for purchase or streaming or whatever you young people do with music these days.
Click and enjoy.
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