ENSEMBLE ECONOMIQUE - Standing Still, Facing Forward

"Brian Pyle is Ensemble Economique. This is the first LP release from Ensemble Economique. Digitalis issued the At the Foot of Nameless Roads CD in 2008. Both recordings are important primers to Pyles nascent invocations of Holger Czukays Cannaxis (on No GPS) and Karlheinz Stockhausens Kontake (on At the Foot). With Standing Still, Facing Forward Ensemble Economique provides the most mature realization of Pyles compositional process, which utilizes found sounds, field recordings, and musical performance that he later meticulously edits, layers, and loops in the studio. The effects of these processes are dramatic, cinematic and conceptually rigorous and this recording evidences Pyle as an important new composer emerging out of the long and storied tradition of West Coast experimentalism. Utilizing a delicate combination of the homespun improvisation of his other project, Starving Weirdos (whose work sounds like an American echo of AMM) with his own unique variation on the European avant-garde in Ensemble Economique, Pyles practice involves a dense approach to composition akin to assemblage. But unlike electronic and laptop composition, Pyles studio work aims to re-establish an organicism associated with live (or, in the case of the field recordings, lived) performance that pushes the studio out into nature and nature into the studio. In short, the Northern Californian landscape plays an integral part in Ensemble Economiques soundscapes, and this record captures much of the atmosphere of Pyles home terrain. LP comes wrapped in a letter-pressed band and contains a 16-page art book." -Amish.