Coppice Halifax - Verdant Acre

[Mellow U]

 

 

 

I haven't posted about this series at WATMM yet, but now that it's completely finished (minus a very special remix effort underway) I figured it would probably appeal to a few people here who appreciate things like GAS and the deeper side of the techno pool.

 

Basically it all started with that Rachmaninoff 3LP set of Isle Of The Dead that xxx was posting about here (remember that?). When he was selling some vinyl off I bought that from him, among other things, and thought at the time it could be cool to really take it all the way into deep techno territory, since the material was already very much along those lines.

 

What ended up happening was much bigger than I could have ever expected. I ended up turning out over an hour of recordings for every side of the 3LP set. I built these pieces almost completely live with the worn out vinyl being almost completely by itself as the non-rhythmic source sound, run through reel to reel tape loop processing, a series of hardware FX such as loopers, delays, reverbs, a flanger, a phase modulator and an 8 track mixer. The rhythmic and bass elements were done with three different drum machines run through similar processing,

 

I decided to focus the sessions on a loose arc of time passing in a dense forest acre - volumes 1 and 2 would be pre-dawn/sunrise, volumes 3 and 4 would be midday/sunshine, and volumes 4 and 5 would be sunset/dusk/late night. I wrote several abstract pieces of text to accompany the music as well, and took a bunch of lo-fi Holga photographs for all of the album art. All the pieces were left unnamed, to add to the elemental, sprawling side of the music.

 

In the end it amounted to almost 10 hours of music. 7 different volumes of work, plus Verdant Versions - a Basic Channel BCD-styled compilation of one track from each volume, reworked in a more club-friendly rhythm-heavy form. Then I produced the epilogue piece - Verdant Overgrowth - which is an 80 minute suite that collects and seamlessly mixes every rhythm track from the entire set over an ambient backdrop reduction of all six sides of the original vinyl.

 

I pressed 50 copies of each release individually, then compiled them all in a limited box set at the end. Now, everything from the physical run is out of print (except a small amount of copies of volumes 4/5/6 and Overgrowth) so I've taken some time to put together a definitive digital version of the whole thing.

 

http://coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com/album/verdant-acre-box-set

 

You can also now buy the individual volumes digitally too:

 

http://coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com/album/verdant-acre-volume-one

http://coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com/album/verdant-acre-volume-two

http://coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com/album/verdant-acre-volume-three

http://coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com/album/verdant-acre-volume-four

http://coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com/album/verdant-acre-volume-five

http://coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com/album/verdant-acre-volume-six

http://coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com/album/verdant-versions

http://coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com/album/verdant-overgrowth

 

I know this is a massive amount of music to experience and digest, but I'm incredibly proud of it all and I hope some of you here can dig it as much as I have.

[Goiter Sanchez]

Very enticing with the writeup! I will take the plunge soon. 'Wantlisted' on Discogs!