Palace Of Lights

Leimer, K.

At The First Clear Sound

Palace Of Lights

Some more new music made with a system of hand-drawn, modular passages rearranged in coherent and incoherent signatures.  The tracks of At the First Clear Sound are stubbornly absent of improvisation, solos, virtuosity, and compositional form while being full of naïveté, a harsh smoothness, an agitated calm, and inharmonic harmonics. Dazzled by the automatic nature of this modular technique Leimer worked quickly, choosing to respect his mistakes and question his choices. “As reliant as the music is on computers, samples, digital processing, and typing, this work is still rather imperfect, rather handmade. And, of course, my compulsion to work with infinitely pliant sound is now clearly bordering on mild psychosis.”  Technically, there’s never a final mix. K. Leimer founded Palace of Lights in 1979. Leimer’s work has also been issued by Autumn, First Terrace, Les Giants, Invisible Inc., Origin Peoples, and RVNG. His early cassette work is included in the critically acclaimed VOD box set ‘American Cassette Culture’ and is included in Cherry Red’s ‘Noise Floor’ series. Leimer has been actively producing music since the mid 1970s—his current catalog includes solo albums, soundtracks, installations, and collaborative albums with Savant, Marc Barreca, Tyler Boley, and Three Point Circle. We are told his work is included in the collection of The British Library.

Barreca, Marc

A Penchant for the Useless

Palace Of Lights

“While performing at an early Twentieth Century steam driven power plant and imagining what its industrial ambiance might have been, an outline of ‘A Penchant for the Useless’ emerged. Like many of my projects, the album started with a search for the kinds of unique, amusical sounds I wanted to work with. And credit is also due to a rereading of Nicolas Collins’ ‘Handmade Electronic Music.’” Using a collection of electric guitar pickups, contact microphones, and transducers that would vibrate random metallic and wooden objects, Barreca built a library of loop recordings. Also recorded were the electronic buzzes and bleeps of a computer and various home appliances.  Granular effect processing and layering with a sampler and a physical modeling synth transformed this largely atonal source material into deep, harmonious assemblages.These long chains of sonic transformations fused with the dark beauty of their industrial steam-era inspiration, and resonate throughout the music. Only rarely will these pieces hint at their now obsolete and decaying source materials. ‘A Penchant for the Useless’ is Marc Barreca’s 15th solo album, adding to a catalog of constantly evolving and refining experimentation and compositional innovation that now spans more than four decades.Barreca has also collaborated with Three Point Circle, Young Scientist, Savant, and K. Leimer. Mastered by Taylor Deupree at 12K Mastering.

Leimer, K.

Weighted Room

Palace Of Lights

Each track of Weighted Room is shaped by multiple generations, arrangements, and voicing of the same starting material — drawing audio out of midi and flipping audio back into midi to be repeatedly rewritten, recast, retimed, and re-voiced.  “Oddly enough by putting these tracks through dozens of iterations the music more or less determined its own form. As a result there’s way more variety here than is typical of any one collection of my work, but it still holds together as a singular statement” Leimer said.  To complete the album Leimer edited, layered, and processed the seven pieces using different parts and passages from all their generations. Some versions contribute as little as a single sound, others form the overall structure, while still other generations play in the foreground, middle ground, or background. The track styles span ambient, dark ambient, new jazz, noise, and new classical with equal focus. As one example, the title track flips the relationship between a lead instrument and the ambient textures that were the original focal point of the music by obscuring its evolving, granular atmosphere with a more melodic sensibility, asking the listener to give attention to buried aura — emphasizing the inversion of traditional instrumental roles which is the defining characteristic of Weighted Room. Mastered by Taylor Deupree with cover art by Simon Adjiashvili, Weighted Room adds a distinctly new setting to K. Leimer’s catalog. 

Leimer, K.

Muted Forms

Palace Of Lights

Muted Forms is the third set of collected tracks in K. Leimer’s Forms series.“While I was design student one professor continually professed his favorite bromide: ”Quantity Yields Quality”. This may or may not be true. But, given the increasing plasticity of any medium, it now seems an invitation to go down the rabbit hole and stay there. Which is how and where the Forms project took shape.”Muted Forms is an inherently more varied collection than Proximate and Resting Forms. Listeners who may fondly recall Eno’s first Music for Films collection will find certain resonances here, especially in the contrast and broad scope of the assembled tracks. Completed pieces sit between unfinished tracks, while the fast, the slow, the loud, and the still all coexist within the defined boundaries of the project. Muted Forms presents all the remaining material generated for the Forms project, emphasizing the free association of voices, pitches, effects, structure, and processing, and joins Proximate, and Resting Forms to complete Leimer’s years-long exercise in ”Quantity Yields Quality”.Mastered by James Savage.

Leimer, K.

Resting Forms

Palace Of Lights

Resting Forms is the second set of collected tracks in K. Leimer’s Forms series. While adhering to the same process used for Proximate Forms, these pieces tend to settle into slightly calmer, more meditative states. Bathed in lush timbres, smooth harmonic distortion set in wavering, modulated soundstages, the music is at once evolving and still. Pare closes the album as the clearest example of the guiding principle of Resting Forms: to reduce every aspect of the audio to some granular minimum. As the title implies, Periphery keeps its distance, refusing to coalesce or adhere to a center. Limn properly provides the barest outlines of a construct while Littoral evokes a more fluid state, perhaps referencing the watery calms of a Neu! track. All the while the instruments shift their character, moving in and out of their original state reaching for the remote and the recognizable, for distortions and deformations. Leimer sought to explore and manipulate sampled acoustic instruments in ways that find a balance between the original source and its reinvented self. The Resting Forms began by using a more traditional compositional approach — shared meter; chromatic settings; melodic gestures. All were present at the outset, then dismantled, reimagined, reevaluated, and reassembled. Across the nine tracks of Resting Forms Leimer guides and edits and processes and restates his work to invent a music which has never existed in any single genre. And he arrives again and again at a reliance on and an embrace of the absolute primacy of sound....

Young Scientist

Strange Beliefs - The Anode Sessions

Palace Of Lights

Young Scientist appeared on the Pacific Northwest music scene in the late 1970s as an anomaly, playing immersive, atmospheric electronic sets using pre-MIDI synthesizers, tape loops and a Mellotron and sounding more kosmische Deutschland than pre-grunge Seattle. They released a handful of cassettes, acquiring a cult following and eventual re-releases on Bureau B, Vinyl on Demand and Cherry Red. Five decades later, Young Scientist reemerges with the duo of James Husted and Marc Barreca providing their take on what electronic music can be. The sound is sculpted using current technology but remains informed by the group’s rich history of electronic sound creation. The duo takes the listener on a trip through a world of pulsing mists, abstract sound collage and kaleidoscopic atmospheres. A sonic tour of strangely beautiful and engaging spaces, well worth the journey.

Leimer, K.

Proximate Forms

Palace Of Lights

Suspended, broken, distorted, dismantled and reassembled on wavering, shifting timelines, the techniques used in Proximate Forms act as an audio exemplar of Merzbau and Decalcomania without a preconceived object. The music seeps through intermittent gaps, hinting at other voices, other structures, other phrases that appear and mutate as they become a part of the whole — or just fall apart. Instruments and tracks are subsumed, manipulated, re-sampled and remade in unbalanced and deep atmospheres in proximities near/far; placements up/down; tones pitched/atonal; paces slow/fast; changes familiar/unpredictable; events percussive/droning; voices dominant/receding — yet still assembling coherent yet transitory states. In Ceaseless, voices never truly align, but rattle and pulse against each other, only finding congruence amid uneven measures. Rift dismantles a single guitar stroke and compounds its timbres into a complete ensemble of frozen and repeating and random pulses. While Birdsong becomes completely weightless, stammering through a choking haze of decaying trills. At the end, Chimera catalogs a condensed representation of the entire set. Across the ten tracks of Proximate Forms Leimer guides and edits and processes and restates his work to invent a music which has never existed in any single genre. And he arrives again and again at a reliance on and an embrace of the absolute primacy of sound. K. Leimer’s Forms project is comprised of three collections emphasizing the free association of voices, pitches, effects, structure, and processing: Proximate, Resting and Muted Forms are scheduled to be issued throughout 2025.

Three Point Circle

Fluorescent Grey

Palace Of Lights

The music, like the titles of Fluorescent Grey, imparts an impossible reconciliation. The “Nearly Remote,” a “Muted Chromesthesia,” the pulse of a “Still Current” or the dying light of “Dull Flares.” These contradictions reconcile opposites to reveal an uncommon ground of perpetual but shifting stability. Sources linger in the background, emerge and then dissolve into a continuously growing soundstage. Calm embraces agitation, which in turn invites noise. Distortion manipulates the purity of sampled harmonics. Melody appears and struggles to apply the most cursory analgesic. This is a music fused from differing digital and sampled sources into a resonant beauty. A beauty—not mere prettiness—that unfolds slowly to reveal deep timbres actively defining their own space and time. On their two previous releases, Three Point Circle’s compositional process willfully blurred individual identities in favor of a collective compositional technique. With Fluorescent Grey K. Leimer, Steve Peters and Marc Barreca established a genuinely distinct ensemble voice. Beginning with the most basic structural constraints, the material generated by an individual member is subjected to whatever degree of annihilation the other members deem appropriate; each successive iteration is then recirculated and further obliterated until consensus is reached. By then, the original gesture is radically altered or almost completely erased, making it nearly impossible to determine who originated what in a given piece. The sublimation of individual egos results in the unpredictably coherent identity of Fluorescent Grey.

Leimer, K. And Marc Barreca

Arrhythmian (Immaterial Edition)

Palace Of Lights

Arrhythmian ( Immaterial Edition ) is the louder, higher-resolution, greater dynamic range, pure digital masters manifestation of the vinyl release by K. Leimer and Marc Barreca. (Immaterial Edition) includes three bonus tracks — left off of the vinyl release to provide more space for the bass-dominated grooves. Arrhythmian uses rhythm as texture. The tracks gravitate to concussive and bass voices, high bpm rates, and constantly evolving timbres shaped by granular synthesis, sampling, heavy processing, audio manipulation, rich distortion, and the maximum, compression-free dynamic range. Not suitable for easy listening. “There are moments where the combination of electronics and beats calls a little bit to mind the vocals-free material on Eno's Nerve Net, if pushed to a much more severe and uncommercial extreme. Even that's a stretch, however, when the material so completely inhabits its own realm.” —Textura

Barreca, Marc

A Discourse Of Mist

Palace Of Lights

In his novel The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro describes a mist of forgetfulness descending on the people, obscuring memory but not distorting historic truth. In contrast, Marc Barreca finds inspiration for the pieces of A Discourse Of Mist, not in forgotten truths but false science, false elements and a history of rumor, conjecture and untruth. Beyond Barreca’s frequent exploration of obscure images, the subjects here are not simply obscure but literally false. Unexpectedly melodic, elegant, wide-ranging in tempo and coloration, A Discourse Of Mist exposes a haze of untruth within a deeply layered soundstage. Intriguing sonic images emerge from a vibrant alchemy: manipulated rich audio strata; hundreds of translucent layers; handbuilt samples; synthesizer-based loops; contrasts in light and dark merged as a beautiful, false world construct. These sculpted, coherent, short-form pieces foster a narrative of clarity over misconception, comprehension over misunderstanding, reality over falsehood. “Widescreen, pastoral visions of ambient music by West Coast US pioneer Marc Barreca of Savant esteem. RIYL Eno, K. Leimer, Phillip Jeck.” —Boomkat

Leimer, K. And Marc Barreca

Arrhythmian

Palace Of Lights

For their fifth collaboration Marc Barreca and Kerry Leimer set aside their more abstract creative approaches to composition in favor of basing the music of Arrhythmian on beats. Using rhythm as texture, the tracks gravitate to concussive and bass voices, high bpm rates, and constantly evolving timbres shaped by granular synthesis, sampling, heavy processing, audio manipulation, rich distortion, with the maximum dynamic range vinyl can offer. “We’re always thinking about sound quality, about what’s possible in a recording for vinyl demands a very specific approach. Pitch, dynamics, layering, density all play a more significant role in analog recording and reproduction,” says Leimer, as Barreca continues, “Let’s just say it’s not music you can dance to...” Arrhythmian is released as a double disc vinyl set, produced to safely allow the grooves their maximum possible excursion while giving one’s stylus a rewarding and demanding workout. Marc Barreca and Kerry Leimer have worked on a nearly parallel musical course for more than forty years. Nearly parallel because their musical paths do occasionally cross. First in 1980 with “Four Pages From An Unfinished Novel” on K. Leimer’s first solo album Closed System Potentials. Again during the live performance of Music For Land And Water and for the massive loop piece “Heart Of Stillness” from The Neo-Realist (At Risk) by the virtual group Savant. K. Leimer founded Palace Of Lights in 1979 and has been actively producing music since the mid 1970s. Marc Barreca has created and performed electronic music since the mid-1970s. His 1980...

Leimer, K.

Obligations

Palace Of Lights

Obligations is sound settled as work-in-progress. The set assembles 11 pieces produced over two years of the daily practice and pursuit of music free of the considerations necessary for assembling a consistent album. Most of these tracks evolved during work for The Starting Errors and Spall and were left out of those releases due to style, theme, pace, and timbral fit. Or, as Peter Hammill has put it, these pieces "went self-deterministic”. Obligations is music that emerged from spontaneous experimentation and play in search of novel sounds and structures, with non-binding tryouts for audio manipulation, processing, and editing. The pieces owe their existence to Leimer’s commitment to daily studio work, exercises designed to yield quality from quantity. While typically calm and slow, these tracks have been collected in the same spirit as The Faust Tapes or Cheer Accident’s Fringements series in their juxtaposition and self-contained quality, while documenting a candid look at Leimer’s work methods.

Leimer, K.

Spall

Palace Of Lights

Write. Record. Break. Recategorize. Reassemble. In K. Leimer’s most recent work, he returns to his long-running interest in developing relationships in sound that are not composed, not planned, not under conscious influence or control. Phrases and patterns emerge from dense layering and editing; melodic elements are split apart, re-voiced and reset in successive contexts. A music of distressed fragments, Spall originates from acoustic, electric, synthesized, manipulated, torn, and piece-work audio that combines into complex, layered, and flowing pieces of unexpected turns and contrasts. Modified, melted, and shaped into shifting sonic environments that fuse the clear signal with the distorted, the recognizable with ambiguous, Spall is music mined from an abandoned quarry.

Leimer, K.

LUYU

Palace Of Lights

“These things happen,” says K. Leimer of LUYU. Listen Until You Understand is a test drive through an obstacle course designed for new instruments, arrangements, juxtapositions, and real-time experiments dedicated to leaving the original impulses untouched and unadorned. Joined at times by digital percussionist Dolphie Stein, the music throws itself against itself without loyalty to genre or form, mashing granular particles into a tremulous spectrum of soundwalls, transitions, noise, distortions, and the occasional clearing. As close to live improvisation as one can get in a multitrack studio setting, LUYU takes generative techniques and drops them into short-form events by building its soundstage in thickets of shifting elements, collapsing phrases, broken signatures, and implied patterns. An outlier in Leimer’s catalog of general stillness and subtle detail, LUYU revels in the bare sound of things usually hidden in the mix. Kerry Leimer founded Palace Of Lights in 1979. Leimer’s work has also been issued by Abstrakce, Autumn, First Terrace, Les Giants, Invisible Inc., Origin Peoples and RVNG. His work is included in the Cherry Red Noise Floor compilation series and his early cassette work is featured in the critically acclaimed VOD box set American Cassette Culture. Leimer has been actively producing music since the mid 1970s—his current catalog includes twenty solo albums plus collaborative albums with Savant, Marc Barreca, and Three Point Circle. Recent soundtracks include work for video artists Cristiane Bouger and Fred Birchman, HBO’s How To With John Wilson and the Netflix documentary John Was Trying to Contact Aliens. His...

Barreca, Marc

Recordings Of Failing Light

Palace Of Lights

Marc Barreca’s Recordings Of Failing Light explores the subatomic matter of ordinary instrument sounds. Pianos, glass percussion, guitars, and feedback are atomized through sampling and granular processing in search of the audio equivalent of a negative image. In the end, these granular elements became the beds and pads for elaborate extrapolations of deconstructed melodic, rhythmic, patterned, and forward-looking sound—and with the addition of analog sequencer and arpeggiator based textures, some tracks reach back to Barreca’s days with Young Scientist. Perhaps as an acknowledgment of the aesthetic guiding Jon Hassell’s Seeing Through Sound, Barreca’s work here finds its origin in images. The gradations and modulation of light and dark in radiographs, rayograms, negatives, old black and white and sepia-tone photos all impart and inform a shaping influence to the waveforms and amplitudes of sound found in these twenty pieces. Heavily layered, simultaneously dense and expansive, Recordings Of Failing Light is the result of experiments conducted in a sonic version of the Hadron Collider. Marc Barreca has been creating and performing electronic music since the mid-1970s. Recordings Of Failing Light is his eleventh solo album for PoL. His 1980 album, Twilight, reissued on vinyl in 2018, was one of the earliest releases on PoL. The Empty Bridge is his tenth solo album for the label. Recent releases include From The Gray And The Green (2019), Shadow Aesthetics (2018), and four collaborations with K. Leimer and two with Three Point Circle. Reissues include work on the acclaimed VOD box set American Cassette Culture,...

Leimer, K.

Music for Land and Water

Palace Of Lights

Marking its Fortieth anniversary, this definitive, release is newly remastered by James Savage and makes available all versions including the only live recording of "Art and Science". Due to the duration of these pieces Music for Land and Water is exclusively available in multiple digital formats. Since 1983 the three pieces that comprise Music for Land and Water have been available in a variety of formats and mixes: the original 1983 Palace of Lights cassette; a remastered version for the Autumn Records CD release; and finally the edited and remixed versions produced for the 2018 limited edition vinyl release on the Les Giants label. Originally developed for a gallery installation, MFLAW was assembled using four closed-loop, multi-track tape players, each playing back a different duration closed loop containing varied time and pitch compatible material. In addition to the installation, Art and Science was performed in Seattle's Seward Park. That performance, included here, shows the effects of winds on open tape loops, adding occasional flutter and distortion as the masters ran from one machine to the next. Seward Park proved an ideal setting for hearing the music, especially out on the trails and among the trees, away from the amphitheater, where the music approached silence.

Leimer, K.

Music for the Open Air

Palace Of Lights

K. Leimer has composed a companion suite of vertical, low-level music for active or passive listening by revisiting and updating the techniques he used for composing Music for Land and Water. An ambient genre exercise, Music for the Open Air is not satisfied to act as aural wallpaper. The tracks present the listener with an evolving set of discrete parts, interacting at different levels and times. Sound that is immersed in detail and depth –– shaped by an overall airiness and shaded by cycles of emerging and retreating subtleties. The pieces range in duration from 21 to 38 minutes, making them ideal for ambient use in public spaces, or random shuffling wherever sheer, organized sound is useful. While Open Air is an easy and comfortable fit for the broad ambient genre, the material doesn’t employ new age gloss and never descends to simpleminded prettiness. Within its clouds and folds the sound reveals rich veins of graininess, distortion, and dissonances that impart a gravity most ambient works lack.

Leimer, K.

The Starting Errors

Palace Of Lights

K. Leimer’s The Starting Errors serves as a handy index of catastrophes. The album documents the way in which the repetition of unexamined cultural behaviors spread as established—even acceptable—practice in the service of the few, no matter how damaging and destructive those practices prove. Music of conscience and consequence set within a general theme of things-gone-wrong, the album is built around a set of errors carefully indexed by the title track: a text-centric piece read by Tallula Bentley, exhibiting an ideological kinship with the work of Henry Cow, here set in an orchestral pastiche. Vocal works are rare for Leimer, but using spoken words in addition to instrumental voices was the most direct path to making his views explicit. Throughout the album techniques surface from jazz-inflected improvisation to classic tape manipulation to granular processing and chamber ensemble airiness. The results catalog most of Leimer’s long history of sonic preoccupations, embracing broken song structures, dark ambience, noise, calamitous repetition, and modular constructs. He describes it this way: “The goal was to use a wide range of approaches, techniques and voicing to best express the subject matter of each piece. And, despite the thematic unity, the pieces evolved in many directions.”

Barreca / Leimer

Drowning Guides

Palace Of Lights

Marc Barreca and Kerry Leimer have worked on a nearly parallel musical course for more than forty years. Nearly parallel because their musical paths do occasionally cross. First in 1980 with “Four Pages From An Unfinished Novel” on K. Leimer’s first solo album Closed System Potentials. Again during the live performance of Music For Land And Water and for the massive loop piece “Heart Of Stillness” from The Neo-Realist (At Risk) by the virtual group Savant. Beyond basic file sharing, their recordings resolve tensions between distinct extremes of restrictive rules, defined procedures, improvisation, conscientious editing, and an ear for expansive details and contrasts. Their collaborative process is intended to subvert traditional and accepted methods of composition, instrumental voicing, signal processing, recording, and mixing with the goal of generating music that lives on the boundaries between established practice and profound impracticalities.  The search for new compositional approaches continues with Drowning Guides. The fourth album by K. Leimer and Marc Barreca deliberately limits their collaborative exchange to re-voicing MIDI tracks. All audio was then returned to the originator to process, edit, mix and finalize the form. The music of Drowning Guides fixates on shifting textures and voices drawn through layers of processing and manipulation, emerging as a complete and distinct audio language.  “This isn’t just superficial commentary on the track listing: this is how it sounds, and how it reflects the new working method, where one participant establishes the basics and the other qualifies and adapts them. It’s actually extremely...

Leimer, K.

Mitteltöner72

Palace Of Lights

Mitteltöner72—K. Leimer’s homage to the German Kosmische period —is an expanded, remixed and newly mastered edition of the Origin Peoples LP released in 2018. ’72 includes all the music produced but not originally released for the LP.  “Leimer’s love of kosmische is evident from the start, as “Dunne Luft” condenses the earmarks of that sound into its four minutes. There’s the solar flares of guitar that arise early on in the track, fuzzy and luminous, serving less as a lead instrument and more as a sonic texture. It sounds like a sly homage to the arcing six-string stylings of Neu! and Harmonia member Michael Rother, but rather than simply pay tribute, Leimer lets pinging synths bustle underneath and processes and loops live drums to keep the track’s momentum going. The flickering rhythms bring to mind the blurry highways evoked on Autobahn while the ghostly melodies of the piece bear the evocative beauty of Popol Vuh. Rather than serve as mere pastiche, Mitteltöner encapsulates Leimer’s unique talents: drawing on a vintage sound now over forty years old and entering into middle age, while also finding a way to push it forward.” —Pitchfork

Taylor, Gregory

Divagate

Palace Of Lights

Journeys are often recounted as though composed of a starting point, a goal, and an intervening distance—when that is often only half the story. What of the path between the destination and the point of origin, dotted with sights one didn’t take in and courses that strayed from the known path? The return can be more circuitous, full of sideways steps and stop-offs at the distracting attractions once passed by on the way. Divagate provides the final segment of the trilogy begun by Gregory Taylor with the arrival and reconnaissance of Retinue, and the resolute pilgrimage of Peregrination. This time, the forking audio pathways swing aside into territories serenaded by 5-tone pedal steel guitars and percolating synths alongside the ringing bronze, fractured vocalise, and a stubborn refusal to conclude the circuit with either triumphal codas or a terrain that dissolves into air; its pensive conclusion abandons the heroism of exploration for the quieter gesture of taking up a pen and starting to write. Divagate comprises the final stages of that journey.

Three Point Circle

Proximity Effects

Palace Of Lights

K. Leimer, Marc Barreca, and Steve Peters first performed together in 1980 for a pair of one-off shows in Olympia, WA. Nearly forty years later, the trio resumed work as Three Point Circle. That reunion resulted in the release of Layered Contingencies in 2020. Their new release, Proximity Effects, continues in a similar vein, obscuring individual contributions into an integrated collective compositional voice.  “...fragments of guitar, electric piano, and bell tones occasionally rise to the surface of these oceanic soundscapes, their generally blurry design tends to camouflage the identifying aspects of their components. Each of the five settings unfolds in a spirit of unhurried drift, the slow pace allowing the listener to closely monitor the material as it develops and to examine the mutating sound design.” —Textura

Leimer, K.

Found Objects

Palace Of Lights

Found object is a loan translation from the French objet trouvé, describing art created from undisguised, but often modified, objects or products that are not normally considered materials from which art is made, often because they already have a non-art function. Like the results from automatic writing and readymades, Found Objects offers an approximation of those techniques in sound by repurposing displaced phrases and timbres, pitches, restatements, and treatments as the root technique. K. Leimer describes it this way: “I worked toward a greater variety of outcomes between each of the pieces, with the goal of providing a more diverse listening experience. At the same time it became important to avoid any specific sense of adhering to a particular genre.” After eleven months in the studio, Found Objects finally became music, but only as the result of almost continuous, arbitrarily redirected accidents.

Barreca, Marc

The Empty Bridge

Palace Of Lights

With The Empty Bridge, Marc Barreca again exploits his distinct talent for translating landscapes into sound. The music was created in and reflects the influence of contrasting environments—the beauty and stillness of the Cascade Mountains and the muted industrial nightscape of the Duwamish Waterway, complete with its massive, now-condemned, empty freeway bridge. The pieces are sculpted from layers of synthesized and sampled instruments, field recordings and processed vinyl. With these sources, Barreca achieves a level of compositional sophistication that deftly combines elements of ambient, drone, noise, and sound art with contrapuntal lines running above and below the dense and shifting aural environments. Composed during a period of tranquil isolation—isolation created by a global pandemic, a broken concrete link to the city, and a remote mountain cabin—The Empty Bridge evokes immersive, evolving, contrasting landscapes.

Taylor, Gregory

Peregrination

Palace Of Lights

Peregrination is the centerpiece of a cycle that began with the release of Retinue (2019) and will find its completion in a final recording yet to come. Where the universe described in Retinue is an expat’s new home, Peregrination packs up, throws open the doors sets out on a pilgrimage whose immediate focus is found among the uncounted details discovered along the path of any and every journey. Built of rhythms, timbres, scales, and voices gathered from an imagined archipelago, Peregrination is simultaneously a walk away and towards a music that shifts between tradition and experiment. In the pilgrimage described in these pieces, Gregory Taylor continues his long exploration of the intricacies, voicings, structures, and meanings of Gamelan traditions with an ear steeped in minimalism, and contemporary electonic- and computer-based musics. Across four long form compositions these often lush and occasionally harsh aural excursions shimmer, shiver, and rest; strive, take form, and collapse in a myriad of manifestations both subtle and overt. The journey of Peregrination and its mirrored returning twin to come represent the summa of Taylor’s renewed cryptohistorical Javanese traditions.

Three Point Circle

Layered Contingencies

Palace Of Lights

The origins of Three Point Circle go back to 1980, when K. Leimer, Marc Barreca, and Steve Peters met for two sparsely-attended shows in Olympia, WA. Some forty years later, they have regrouped as Three Point Circle. Perhaps better described as a process than as a musical group, Three Point Circle has developed a collaborative system that replaces standards of improvisation and authorship with a new, independent, compositional identity removed from the individual habits and traits of the members. Layered Contingencies presents the first results in this quest for uncertainty—five long form pieces of sharp and smooth contrasts taking place in a soundstage of rest, unrest, shallows, and depths that manage to maintain an unpredictable coherence.

Leimer, K.

A Figure Of Loss

Palace Of Lights

A Figure Of Loss takes K. Leimer’s music into highly personal terrain.  Written and recorded during two dark years, the resulting work hovers in proximity of a calm and placid consistency, tenuously balanced on expanding and contracting foundations. Built mostly around modeled and treated piano and digital synthesis, a sense of coherence emerged from piece to piece during the recording and editing process, yielding a sustained, but disturbed elegiac atmosphere, seemingly content to meditate on its own specific set of limits. But A Figure Of Loss reaches from well-defined patterns to fragmented and shifting densities. This is a music of reflection, setting itself at a distance from loss in order to possibly comprehend it. The CD includes a portfolio of photographs by Tyler Boley and a download code for the entire album. It was mastered by James Savage.K. Leimer founded Palace Of Lights in 1979. Leimer’s work has also been issued by Autumn, First Terrace, Les Giants, Invisible Inc., Origin Peoples and RVNG. His early cassette work is included in the critically acclaimed VOD box set American Cassette Culture and is included in Cherry Red’s Noise Floor series. Leimer has been actively producing music since the mid 1970s—his current catalog includes eighteen solo albums plus collaborative albums with Savant and Marc Barreca. His work is included in the collection of The British Library.

Leimer, K. / Marc Barreca

Chains Of Being

Palace Of Lights

Walking through the paths of Brian Eno, Harold Budd or Roedelius, K. Leimer and Marc Barreca offer a conceptual and contemporary approach to Early music, exploring its ambiences, timbres and emotions. Sonic textures and noise meet the strings of a viola da gamba in a cinematic work. ”These three pieces spring from a love of Early Music, specifically the works of Sainte-Colombe, Marin Marais and John Dowland. Each of these composers — their lives spanning a period of great musical innovation and change from 1563 to 1728 -- is represented by a track included here. While there are no direct quotations present from any of their pieces there is a now familiar reliance on timbre and even on drone, elements that flourished in the often slowly-paced and harmonically narrow style of Early Music. Those stylistic elements have been taken up today, deliberately or not, by Ambient, Dark Ambient, Post-Ambient, and Slow Music artists. In atmosphere Early Music often evokes a melancholic — even elegiac — sensibility appropriate to the present time." — K. Leimer  "These three tracks were inspired by the shadows, streams of sunlight, muted colors and peaceful interior ambience of Spanish cathedrals. Calm and mystery combined." — Marc Barreca  K. Leimer and Marc Barreca are two American synth/multi-instrumental musicians that have been active since late 70's. Their previous collaborations are available on the Palace of Lights imprint and much of their earliest work has been reissued by labels like Vinyl on Demand, Rvng Intl and Freedom...

Barreca, Marc

From The Gray And The Green

Palace Of Lights

Moving in the directions that originated with the Environments recordings and evolved to become extended pieces like Klaus Schulze’s Gewitter, Robert Henke’s Studies For Thunder, Brian Eno’s On Land and Steve Peter’s Here-ings, the music of From The Gray And The Green finds its origins in landscapes. This time, landscapes that Marc Barreca knows as his home—the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. These eleven pieces and three digital-only bonus tracks are sculpted from layers of synthesized and sampled instruments, field recordings and processed vinyl. Barreca tells us that “My goal was to create immersive, evolving landscapes shaped by a dynamic past and viewed as if through the translucence of passing clouds.” From The Gray And The Green offers a music of contrasts and change, departing from traditional ideas of ambient to arrive in shifting landscapes of the strange and the beautiful. Includes an eight-page booklet and download card for the complete album and three bonus tracks. Mastered by James Savage. Marc Barreca has been creating and performing electronic music since the mid-1970s. His 1980 album, Twilight, reissued on vinyl in 2016, was one of the earliest releases on Palace Of Lights. From The Gray And The Green is his ninth solo album for the label. Recent releases include Shadow Aesthetics (2018) and three collaborations with K. Leimer. Reissues include work on the acclaimed VOD box set American Cassette Culture, the Cherry Red compilation of seminal U.S. electronic music and the 1983 cassette, Music Works For Industry, now on vinyl. His...

Taylor, Gregory

Retinue

Palace Of Lights

The six extended pieces on Retinue had their beginning in a book on creating step sequencers using Max/MSP that Gregory Taylor wrote for Cycling ’74 after his return from the Netherlands (where his previous sonic diary Randstad was recorded). The development of the book’s materials was an opportunity to re-encounter his love for sequencing as practiced by the form’s early (Edgar Froese, Suzanne Ciani, Michael Hoenig) and later (Saul Stokes, Paul Ellis) practitioners and also to explore its connections with longer form Javanese musical traditions that have informed his work for decades. The crypto Javanese / 1970s German chill-out room hybrid cross composed and recorded using Max/MSP, analog and digital hard / softsynths, and field recordings that resulted is a patient and poised music that embraces fluidity, recombinance, and a languid ambience that reveals itself on repeated listening. After a hiatus from the cassette culture movement of the 1980s, Gregory Taylor returned to regular recording and live performance as an improviser in the late 1990s. He has studied central Javanese Gamelan and electroacoustic music at Cornell, UW-Madison, New England Conservatory and the Instituut voor Sonologie, and written for publications such as Wired, Recording, Array, and Option, and hosted RTQE—a radio program of contemporary audio on WORT-FM since 1986. He currently works for Cycling ‘74. Retinue is his fifth album for Palace Of Lights.

Leimer, K.

Useless Epitomes

Palace Of Lights

Originally released in 2008, The Useless Lesson and Lesser Epitomes have been revisited, remixed, remastered and expanded with the 40-minute bonus EP Three Adaptations. K. Leimer founded Palace Of Lights in 1979. Leimer’s work has also been issued by Autumn, First Terrace, Les Giants, Invisible Inc., Origin Peoples and RVNG. His early cassette work is included in the critically acclaimed VOD box set American Cassette Culture and will be included in Cherry Red’s upcoming Noise Floor series. Leimer has been actively producing music since the mid 1970s—his current catalog includes eighteen solo albums plus collaborative albums with Savant and Marc Barreca. His work is included in the collection of The British Library.  “Lesser Epitomes provides three short suites of music all composed using a system of chance to give shape to basic musical elements. The listener is then advised to randonly re-order them, creating a vast number of permutations within the set... as brief episodes of grouped strings move past each other with the stately indifference of dancers in a ballroom.” —The Wire   “The opening pieces set the bar remarkably high: ‘To force closed our eyes’ introduces the album with mournful string patterns that recall Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3 (aka Symphony of Sorrowful Songs), and ‘Failing need of more,’ a fourteen-minute collaboration by Leimer and phonographer Anode, billows heavenly like a gargantuan, almost imperceptibly moving cloud mass. By album’s end, I’m none the wiser as to how Leimer produced The Useless Lesson but the largely glorious results...

Barreca, Marc

Shadow Aesthetics

Palace Of Lights

With Shadow Aesthetics, Marc Barreca accomplishes something rare in electronic and ambient musics. The fluid, dynamic changes and movement within pieces; the complexities in time and pitch variation and evolution—typically absent from the mostly homogenous constructs of drone and ambient—all bring previously unavailable depth, shading and emotional charges to a form usually admired for its neutrality. Shadow Aesthetics results from a virtual arsenal of digital and analog sources operating in a complex system of origination, structuring, processing and editing. The result is a moving, articulate and complex work: music that is a profoundly emotive, original, and experimental electronic work that is in many ways the culmination of decades of listening, performing and composing in a form known best for continuous change.The album includes an eight-page booklet and a digital download code for the complete album plus two bonus tracks. Marc Barreca has been creating and performing electronic music since the mid-1970s. His 1980 album, Twilight, reissued on vinyl last year, was one of the earliest releases on PoL. Shadow Aesthetics is his eighth solo album for the label. Recent releases include Aberrant Lens (2017) and three collaborations with K. Leimer. Reissues include work on the acclaimed VOD box set American Cassette Culture, an upcoming Cherry Red compilation of seminal U.S. electronic music and the 1983 cassette, Music Works for Industry, now on vinyl. His work is also included in the collection of The British Library.

Leimer, K.

Degraded Certainties

Palace Of Lights

“Degraded Certainties was generated via the layering of arbitrarily ordered tone clusters and by using signal reprocessing as the principal method by which to determine the music’s timbre and form. Such production details are interesting but convey little, however, of how beautiful the six soundscapes are that (K.) Leimer and company have created. In the opening “Angoisse,” an occasional harp pluck appears amidst enveloping swathes of digital sound, while vaporous shimmer and hazy synth tones and phased slivers and lilting string plucks dominate elsewhere. A connection to classical minimalism emerges during “Common Nocturne” when sparse droplets of acoustic piano playing appear alongside gentle synthetic swells. Strings and electronics swim leisurely in deep electroacoustic seas, and ethereal, elegiac, tranquil, peaceful, and placid are just some of the words that might spring to mind as you listen to the recording’s time-suspending settings.”  —Textura  K. Leimer founded Palace Of Lights in 1979. Leimer’s work has also been issued by Autumn, First Terrace, Les Giants, Origin Peoples, and RVNG as well as early work included in an upcoming Cherry Red retrospective of seminal U.S. electronica and the VOD box set American Cassette Culture. Leimer has been actively producing music since the mid 1970s—his current catalog includes 18 solo albums plus collaborative albums with Savant and Marc Barreca. His work is included in the collection of The British Library.

Leimer, K.

Threnody

Palace Of Lights

Threnody by K. Leimer is a music of disorientation, error and loss. Free of any particular sense of continuity or structure, Threnody dwells in an absent-minded and forgetful state, inhabiting an aftermath of events too disorienting to be completely comprehended. Highly atmospheric, the music draws from influences as diverse as Arve Henriksen, David Sylvian, Taylor Deupree and Biosphere. Shattered phrases emerge among shrouded details in a state of sustained incompleteness. In a departure for Leimer, this music is highly improvised, mostly studio-generated in real-time. “I approached the work by repeatedly abandoning it and, at some later time, after pursuing some other task, after days or weeks of new outrages, wandered back and tried to once more pick up the threads.” Threnody is music tuned to a fractured time.K. Leimer founded Palace of Lights in 1979. Leimer’s work has also been issued by Autumn, First Terrace, Les Giants, Origin Peoples and RVNG and his cassette work is included in the critically acclaimed VOD box set American Cassette Culture. Leimer has been actively producing music since the mid 1970s—his current catalog includes eighteen solo albums plus collaborative albums with Savant and Marc Barreca. His work is included in the collection of The British Library.

Taylor, Gregory

Randstad

Palace Of Lights

Randstad is a kind of hermetic diary of a year living in the randstad—a term the Dutch use to describe their own megalopolis that encompasses Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht. In its own way, the work runs contrary to today’s assumed absolute limitlessness of musical possibility, favoring a reduced expatriate sonic toolkit (composed of Cycling ’74’s Max, a modest Eurorack, and a handheld digital recorder). Its entries combine the sounds of a “new home” (house keys, birds on the terrace, fireworks at the New Year) that are stretched / rotated / folded / spindled / annealed into a set of audio vignettes. The results are snapshots of sensation, location, movement, and image: a score for re-orienting yourself in new, changing environments. To paraphrase Roethke, we learn by going not only where to go, but how to go. The CD includes a download card for Randstad and the bonus EP Trajectum. After a hiatus from the cassette culture movement of the 1980s, Gregory Taylor returned to regular recording and live performance as an improviser in the late 1990s. He has studied central Javanese Gamelan and electroacoustic music at Cornell, UW-Madison, New England Conservatory and the Instituut voor Sonologie, and written for publications such as Wired, Recording, Array, and Option, and hosted RTQE—a radio program of contemporary audio on WORT-FM since 1986. He currently works for Cycling ’74. Randstad is his fourth album for PoL.

Leimer, K.

Imposed Order / Imposed Absence (Remastered + Expanded)

Palace Of Lights

The first phase of K. Leimer’s recorded work began in 1972 with the production of the Grey Cows cassette and culminated in 1983 with the release of Imposed Order. Though work seemingly stopped following the release of I/O, Leimer continued to record and experiment with sound during what proved to be a 15-year interegnum for his Palace of Lights label. That work, never before issued, is included in this expanded remaster. Imposed Absence features ten tracks recorded in the years between Imposed Order and his return to releasing music with The Listening Room.Imposed Absence features the addition of Mellotron and early digital synths, some excursions into lo-fi and, unusual in his catalog, a few improvised tracks. Combined with the VOD double album of his earliest tape recordings and RVNG’s A Period Of Review double album, the release of Imposed Order / Imposed Absence brings the entirety of Leimer’s early work into view. Remastered by Taylor Deupree at 12K Mastering, the vinyl includes a four-page booklet and download card for all nineteen tracks.K. Leimer founded Palace of Lights in 1979. Leimer has been actively producing music since the mid 1970s—his current catalog includes eighteen solo albums plus collaborative albums with Savant and Marc Barreca. His work is included in the collection of The British Library.

Barreca / Leimer

Dual Mono

Palace Of Lights

Dual Mono is the third Barreca | Leimer collaboration. The process used for producing Dual Mono was designed to destabilize established habits and predilections in favor of responding to the music in at least subjectively new ways. It was also designed to reduce the illusion of control, to become more responsive to and accepting of unpredicted outcomes, and to give the music—as much as possible—a voice less tampered with. Each piece for Dual Mono was authored by only one of the participants, the other receiving MIDI data and being limited to revoicing the composition. With a general goal of maintaining a result that was somewhat, though not purely, minimalist in sympathy, each piece was then assembled in its final form by the originator, now limited to controlling relative levels, crossfades, editing and processing. The final fifteen pieces that span two CDs embrace a range of emergent, generative and traditional forms that express a calm, informed ambience amid unsettled, shifting soundscapes. Of an earlier collaboration, Textura stated “the sheer density of sound presented in representative settings such as ‘Loess’, ‘Talus’, and ‘Oram’ is incredible, and one comes away from Field Characteristics convinced that the claim regarding the hundreds of sounds involved in the recording’s presentation is clearly fact, not hyperbole.”

Peters, Steve

Airforms (chamber Music 10)

Palace Of Lights

Chamber Music is an ongoing series of site-specific sound works made entirely from a single recording of the empty space in which they are presented. An hour of “silent” room tone is recorded when no people are in the building; this is heavily filtered to extract drones derived from the room’s resonant frequencies. This is the only sonic material used, and there is minimal electronic processing involved. Airforms was made in 2013 as a birthday gift for Steve Roden, who provided two hours of empty room tone recorded in his bubble-shaped “Airform” house designed and built by architect Wallace Neff in 1946. The first hour was used to make the drones, and the second hour to make the bell-like tones, and the two are here superimposed. Certain Roden-inspired compositional strategies were devised to generate indeterminate structures. “This is literally chamber music – sound artist Steve Peters records the ambient resonances of empty rooms, which he then turns into site-specific installations exhibited in the same locations. The latent acoustic potential of the space is brought out into a more tangible form. For the most part, stony sonorities are all that can be heard: long, looming tones that unfold incredibly slowly...these are broken by moments of vivid detail: sounds like dropping water, or the soft report of a sonar, gather and disperse, apparently randomly – though after a while they almost recall Morse code.” —The Wire

Barreca / Leimer

Field Characteristics

Palace Of Lights

Field Characteristics derives from the Marc Barreca | K. Leimer performance produced by Steve Peters for the Wayward Music series, presented 14 November 2014, at the Chapel performance space in Seattle. The audio originated from hundreds of independently recorded digital, electric, acoustic and found sounds. These fragments were edited, layered and reprocessed with Pro Tools and Ableton Live. The performance consisted of manipulating and mixing both live and prepared audio. Utilizing the same sources as well as recordings of the performance, Field Characteristics represents a further extrapolation of the material. CD includes an 8-page booklet of images used in the performance. Field Characteristics followed the first Barreca | Leimer album, Premap, released in 2014.

Barreca, Marc

Aberrant Lens

Palace Of Lights

Marc Barreca’s seventh solo album for Palace of Lights extends his work with a broader and deeper palette of synthesized and sampled sound, including sources as diverse as prepared guitars, pianos, Indonesian metallophones and glass harmonica. The music of Aberrant Lens employs long MIDI delays, synced MIDI processing via MAX for Live and extreme warping of disparate looped sound sources driven into entirely new states. The results are new, coherent aural structures: music that questions traditional definitions of ambient and electronic forms. And, to the educated ear, within this search for innovation and experimentation Aberrant Lens reveals many of Barreca’s earliest influences. Even when integrated in thoroughly non-retro compositions, the hints of homage to Cluster and the first Fripp & Eno releases inhabit these twelve new settings. Marc Barreca has been creating and performing electronic music since the mid-1970s. His 1980 album, Twilight, was one of the earliest releases on Palace of Lights. His cassette-era album Music Works for Industry is being reissued by the RVNG spin-off Freedom To Spend, and his early cassette work is included in the upcoming VOD box set American Cassette Culture, which also features Marc’s early electronic music group Young Scientist. His work is included in the collection of The British Library.