The Light Moves Between

William Selman is an artist based in Portland, Oregon who has previously released work on Mysteries of the Deep, Hausu Mountain, Digitalis, and his own Critique of Everyday Life label (co-managed with Chris Miller aka Gunnar Haslam).

Label notes:

Music offers infinite routes to the summit and way beyond. It demonstrably excels when it comes to escaping the planet altogether. On first listening to these pieces we immediately identified a presence originating elsewhere. Something clearly sentient and hyper intelligent, but working on inputs and processes unfathomably different from our own. Despite the mind boggling unfamiliarity it was clear that there was a scheme or narrative of some kind rather than unending and unordered abstraction, something empathetic even.

What then of William Selman's part in this? He explains this best in his own words below, but as listeners you can judge where the line sits between exposing what is already there and creating something altogether new. Can scenes from the Pacific Northwest of America connect us to entities in distant universes, or are we listening to William's unique processing of his own surroundings? You may conclude that the distinction is irrelevant, but we hope you get as much enjoyment as we did from exploring it.

Artist notes:

After a long hiatus, I started making visual work again with the aim of bringing it together with my sound work. The first three pieces were written to accompany three short films that I made - although the first one ("Outshone the Sun") was put aside. The second and third pieces are completed short films.

"Outshone the Sun" is inspired by sunspots and solar activity. Shortwave radio interference is common during solar storms. On a trip last year to the smallest inhabited island on the Puget Sound in Washington, I recorded barnacles during a low tide. Barnacles and other tide pool sea life is declining under recent heat waves. The sounds of the barnacles popping air bubbles had similar sonic characteristics to me to the shortwave radio recordings I made.

"Kept in Banks and Vessels" was filmed and sounds were collected on an extended camping trip I took near one of the many inland lakes in the Pacific Northwest. During the trip, I made hydrophone recordings of the dam at the lake when I noticed that there was a persistent high pitched hum (that was a few cents off of a G note) coming from the water rushing through the dam.

"Flutter at the False Light" was shot in my backyard studio in Portland, Oregon. There was quite a bit of activity happening in my neighbor's normally very static yard over a few weeks. I wanted to capture the feeling of that stasis but punctuated by changes that happened with my usual view out of the window. The sounds are all recorded by non-air microphones in my studio, these include contact mics and electro-magnetic mics that pick up electro-magetic fields and make them audible.

The last track is inspired by a loose collection of influential, American landscape photographers such as Louis Baltz and Robert Adams known as "New Topographics" (after a museum exhibit). These are photos of empty, non-places in (primarily) the American West. I recorded many of the sounds for the first half of the piece in Central Oregon and in the John Day Valley which is one of the most remote regions in the US. Sounds such as birds, wind storms, electrical lines, and water wells. I wanted to work with this material horizontally, building up layers in a landscape-like manner (like minimal infrastructure). The second half is the same idea but recorded with instrumental elements: Serge synthesizer, organ, and bowed (and hit) vibraphone.