Finally got around to picking up a proper copy of this collaboration which dropped in June. Giuseppe Ielasi and Andrew Pekler remain two of our favourite artists on the experimental tip, both featuring with heavy rotation on our NTS show.
Ielasi has been a prolific composer and an explorer of the music created from minimal contrasts. His relationship with music concrete stylings has become his own dedicated art form; small movements of recorded sounds designed around the absent of conventional music as much as the structure or organic sound.
Andrew Pekler’s career has been based around more sound but an equally engaging experimental nature in music, and mostly with the interesting pieces in the name of art. Presenting installations frequently, it’s through concept albums that Pekler’s music is best known to us. Moving on to new ideas like so many schizophrenic geniuses before him, it’s worth taking the time to explore the man’s catalogue in exhibition and record press.
This collaboration is exactly what we would have wanted from the pairing. Ielassi’s vast sonic openness and environmental insight is given a new context with chords and structures. Pekler’s often pleasant and dream-like composition is given a rougher unprocessed edge.
As if from mutual respect, both artists seem to have held back with their own styles for the greater good. Not that either is known for excess, but for whatever reason the tracks have a uniquely comfortable feeling. Brilliant listening start to finish.
Only 250 pressed, properly surprised there’s still some left. Check out the label info below (void of capitals), with a track streamed underneath it, then head out to get one if you still can.
via Planam
in april 2011 giuseppe ielasi and andrew pekler met for a three day recording session at pekler’s studio in berlin. in a comfortable atmosphere and with a minimum of preparation, the two artists endeavored to find common musical ground through their shared interests in sample manipulation, layering the texture and improvisation. some months later ielasi auditioned the recordings and then mixed down his favorite passages. to a few of these selections pekler then added an overdub or an edit, but for the most part “holiday for samples” is a document of real-time interaction. the title “holiday for sampler” and the holiday resort names of the individual track titles (side a: yalta / ribadeo / parghelia / neringa. side b: vegas / olgino / oga / yallingup / maly losjin) are an oblique reference to both the pleasures of leisure travel and to the interplay of the familiar and the foreign, themes at the center of ielasi’s and pekler’s artistic practice. one-time pressing edition limited to 250 copies, mixed and mastered by giuseppe ielasi and with cover artwork by andrew pekler.