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Download live performance from Mutek 2009
Surfaces of a Broken Marching Band
released on CD and digital formats on Anticipate Recordings
Find it on itunes or your favorite digital shop.
"In a creation like Surfaces of a Broken Marching Band which relies on such elusive drifts for locomotion, Honig's sure-handed subtlety is marked enough for declarative moments on my part: there hasn't been a better "ambient" album this year." - Resident Advisor
"Ezekiel Honig's latest album is a gloriously captivating excursion through deep rhythmic structures, cataclysmic audio sequences and soft, melodic vibrations.
.nothing can come close to describing just how amazing this release really is." - Cyclic Defrost
"Honig's blending of everyday ("found") sounds, like milling crowds, falling wood, and assorted creaks and moans, with a heartbeat bass, delicate sequencing and loops, and thick, ballsy, brassy synths is nothing short of breathtaking." - The London Times
About the release:
Anticipate label head Ezekiel Honig makes his initial appearance for this imprint, with his first album since 2006’s Scattered Practices (released on Microcosm Music). Since then, in addition to working on this release, Ezekiel has been concentrating on moving Anticipate through its first two years of existence, and Surfaces of a Broken Marching Band is as much a statement on the label as a whole as it is a reflection of his current working process.
Continuing along his musique concrete influenced compositional procedure of giving emphasis to the sounds of everyday life, Honig constructs his music out of an almost incidental assembly of materials, editing and processing them into a whole which adopts the shards as if they always belonged. The low hum of a pad and ground skimming percussion noise play off brightly distended piano chords, thick, wheezing horns, and widespread constellations of re-pitched guitar. Playing with looping and lateral progressions alike, Honig subtly hints at his background, while utilizing a broader palette of instrumentation than his past releases. Softly chugging 4/4 rhythms barely nod towards muted slow-motion techno, while reworked structures retain his characteristically warm, textured sound. In this manner, he delves into electro-acoustics with a sensibility that includes elements of clearly defined genres, while allowing those definitions to quickly dissipate.
This music is imbued with an intimacy created by opening the spectrum to include sounds from crowded parties in cavernous spaces, subway stations, the interiors of an airliner and other geographic departures. When in the context of music which feels so
close-up, these sounds create a contrast to the at-homeness which Honig usually plays on, and this proximity gives them more weight, as the harmonics of melodic fragments and location-based recordings rummage through and across each other. While rhythms brush up against, and are indeed constructed from, the rattle of metal, wood and plastic, Honig inspects the surfaces that were previously hidden - the sounds that required breaking in order to exist.
Piece in Modyfier Process Series about the track "Broken Marching Band"
"Concrete & Plastic" video by Joshue Ott via superDraw:
A short biography:
A New York City native, and founder/label manager for the Anticipate and
Microcosm labels, Ezekiel Honig concentrates on his idiosyncratic brand of emotively warm electronic-acoustic music. Using the loop as more of a tool than a rule, Honig paints outside the lines, nestling into a comfortable space between techno, house and ambient - using them as reference points from which to stray, rather than as steadfast frameworks. Drawing on the rich history of musique concrete, Honig looks to incorporate a material nature into his music by imbuing it with a host of field recording/found-sound sources in the search for a balance between digital software innovation and the physicality of the world around us. His music is one of contrast and contradiction, combining minimal, abstract tendencies with a core of timeless harmonics - pairing fuzzy chords with clunky and dirty "mishaps."
Following an incremental shift through a number of critically acclaimed releases, Honig's work has been featured in The Wire (UK), XLR8R (USA), The Village Voice (USA), De:Bug (Germany), Textura (Canada), Flavorpill/Earplug (USA), Time Out New York (USA), Spex (Germany), Urb (USA), TRAX (France) and many other publications worldwide. His personal musical movement has been directly linked with the development of the Anticipate and Microcosm labels. Spending as much time on curatorial activities and label management as he does on his own music production has afforded Honig a unique viewpoint from which to work, and informs his activities in multiple stages of the musical process, as well as offering him the chance to collaborate with other artists.
In addition to his studio releases and label work, Honig performs live consistently, and, in this setting, strives to push beyond the boundaries of the recorded material. His improvisational approach combines loops and elements from various songs with on-the-fly arrangements, editing and effects. Viewing the recorded material as a constantly shifting body of work leaves space for serendipitous moments and leads to each set being an individualized rework, referencing and reprocessing itself. As a result of this flexibility to tailor sets to the environment, Honig's performances have been known to take the form of deep after-hours techno, rhythmic near-ambient or heartbeat-driven installation.
Albums available on CD and mp3:
For more single/EP/remix releases, audio and info, please visit www.ezekielhonig.com.
Full discography on Discogs page.
