December 2011
1 post
End-of-year news
The Union (Hundred Acre Recordings) is named #4 Album of the Year by The Liminal and #8 Solo Guitar Recording of the Year by The Out Door:
“It is an album that elucidates poetic concepts of self and memory and yet sidesteps the normal modes of communication. It deserves your attention.” — The Liminal.
“Rural upstate New York musings that are as weighty as they are gentle.” — The Out Door.
It...
September 2011
2 posts
Moving
This site seems to have run its course. It will stay here for those who want to read old posts, reviews, listen to old demos, etc., but I’ll be over at http://www.hallockhill.com now. Click on the Words tab there to read my occasional thoughts.
Image by Marin Franov from “Martgareta Lekic, Cardboard Boxes,” gallery Waldinger, Osijek, Croatia.
Landscape
The cars passed incessantly along the road which ran parallel, down the western slope, to the aqueduct on which we walked. Out of rhythm, they were a rhythm of themselves. So too the helicopters that would pass, the small passenger planes. Unregulated in time, but ever present. Out of balance, but there and without regard for clock or measure. Our footsteps were similarly displaced, and...
July 2011
1 post
There He Unforeseen
Released July 11, 2011. Mastered by James Plotkin.
1. Garden 2. Fossil 3. New Place Aviary 4. Ligonier Point 5. Needing Bones 6. A Burning Question (A Question of Burning)
Things have broken apart. Though voices collide, they can rarely commingle. The collage is extruded into some new space where shards of old things are new, and new things found old. Things break together.
People come and...
June 2011
3 posts
'Acera or The Witches Dance' by Jean Painlevé
Teeth
Teeth by Hallock Hill
A track created on an airplane above the Atlantic Ocean last October during the recording of The Union.
Spring
Spring by Hallock Hill
This track comes from the early recording sessions for The Union.
May 2011
2 posts
Hallock Hill & Tim Noble - The Jumbled Hills
The Jumbled Hills by Hallock Hill and Tim Noble by Hundred Acre Recordings
Here’s my transatlantic collaboration with Tim Noble. Listen to Tim’s Diffaith now, and make sure you don’t miss his work with Paul Newland as The Lowland Hundred.
The Union released today
Hundred Acre Recordings releases The Union today. Copies can be purchased at their shop:
Hundred Acre Recordings Shop
Track listing:
I began to lose myself within a wonder
Sand in my eyes
Ausable
Grow
Marked
The Chair
The Miller
Pencil spin
On Sundays when I wake up
My video for ‘The Chair’:
Hallock Hill - The Chair from Hallock Hill on Vimeo.
April 2011
3 posts
Hallock Hill - The Union, now available for...
My album The Union is now available for pre-order from Hundred Acre Recordings. You can visit their shop to reserve a copy in advance of the May 2nd release date.
Track listing:
I began to lose myself within a wonder
Sand in my eyes
Ausable
Grow
Marked
The Chair
The Miller
Pencil spin
On Sundays when I wake up
Here is Sam Christie’s video for “The...
Tim Noble - Diffaith (Hundred Acre Recordings)
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ché la diritta via era smarrita. — Dante Alighieri, first tercet to L’Inferno At the midpoint of the journey’s life I found myself lost in a dark forest with no straight path I could see anywhere. — Translated by M.L. Rosenthal
The path on which, through...
Hallock Hill, “Tom’s Harvest,”...
March 2011
3 posts
Tim Noble - Diffaith, reviewed at The Liminal →
The outstanding review by Matt Poacher of Tim Noble’s ‘Diffaith’ at The Liminal must be read. ‘Diffaith’ is an album-of-the-year, and Poacher’s review is a tour-de-force.
Preview ‘Diffaith’ at Hundred Acre Recordings and mark April 7 on your calendar as the date for purchase.
Bwlchystyllen from sam christie on Vimeo.
New Place Aviary
New Place Aviary by Hallock Hill
This is the third movement from my current project, called ‘There He Unforeseen.’
February 2011
2 posts
WatchHallock Hill, “On Sundays when I wake up,” The Union (Hundred Acre Recordings, early 2011)
You are looking at the bottom of Lake Champlain, captured by a camera floating in a plastic bag on the surface of the water. “On Sundays when I wake up” is the final track on my forthcoming album, The Union. Those interested in reserving a copy can do so at Hundred Acre Recordings....
WatchTim Noble, ‘Disgwylfa Fach,’ Diffaith (Hundred Acre Recordings, forthcoming 2011).
Put yourself on the Hundred Acre Recordings mailing list for updates on the release of ‘Diffaith.’
January 2011
5 posts
WatchVideo for “The Chair” from my forthcoming album The Union. Reserve a copy at Hundred Acre Recordings.
"Needing Bones"
Hallock Hill, “Needing Bones”
Banjo and effects:
Needing Bones by Hallock Hill
*AR - Wolf Notes
How is it that we feel the color ‘yellow’ or experience ‘melancholy’ in a certain line played on a violin? We can stare at the side of a wooded hill and differentiate a multitude of ‘greens’ and feel something for each of them, perhaps, and feel something for them together — the mass of tonal variation casting off a different sense than the solitary tree. There are of course scientific ...
December 2010
2 posts
Hallock Hill - 'The Union'
Today officially announces the forthcoming release of my album The Union, due early 2011 from Hundred Acre Recordings:
Subscribe to Hundred Acre Recordings for updates on the release of The Union.
Reserve your copy now.
Also opened is another Hallock Hill site for my own musical movements. Hallockhill.net will still exist as an outlet for my writing and other interests.
The Miller by...
November 2010
7 posts
Charles Olson, “Maximus, to himself,”...
Mike Shiflet, “Llanos,” Llanos...
Yonkers Power Station, 6 November 2010
Glass breaks further under foot. The cascades of sunlight through the broken ceiling catch on the edges of the shards, and on the tile walls. Where the giant turbines once stood is a massive reverberant hall. A palimpsest. Words and pictures obscuring sweat and century-old brick and cement. Wires severed from walls and mechanisms, knobs unturned. Or turned. Echoes not only of the howling wind...
Koen Holtkamp - Gravity/Bees (Thrill Jockey)
A soft swell opens ‘In The Absence Of Gravity Please Note The Position Of The Sun’ and soon an acoustic guitar is percussed, tapping out block chords. A distant harmonica sounds chords, blending, articulating a different harmonic perspective. Sounds feed through a delay (or delays), so what you hear returns, mixes with new parts in motion. Layers and sounds constructed, slowly. Then the...
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Love is a Stream (Type)
The final track on Love is a Stream, ‘Mirrors Death,’ is so achingly beautiful it worms its way into the mind and juggles everything that’s inside. Its fluid, flowing drones support a continually squelched guitar melody, a melody that yearns to escape its distorted and gated effects, but cannot. It is a turbulent, liquid melody atop a placid foundation, fractured and pure. When Love is a...
October 2010
2 posts
Philip Jeck - An Ark for the Listener (Touch)
The novelist and poet Gilbert Sorrentino once visited Louis Zukofsky, best known as the author of the monumental epic poem ‘A’. The conversation eventually turned to Zukofsky’s equally-epic study Bottom: On Shakespeare. The aging Modernist asked Sorrentino if he’d like to see his notes for the book. At 470 pages, with a 232 page accompanying volume of music by his wife Celia, Bottom was...
Jon Mueller - The Whole (Type)
The paradox of meditation is that it requires an immense amount of training and concentration. It isn’t easy to discipline the mind and body, teach them to quiet, to exit their pursuits and let space and time be ends in themselves. Getting to the meditative state Jon Mueller reaches on The Whole demands an intensity rarely found today. Technology has made discipline old-fashioned, has...
September 2010
8 posts
WatchJon Mueller at Pecha Kucha Night in Chicago on December 2, 2008
I’ve been listening to a lot of Jon Mueller this week. Here he is talking about listening.
What is Marchinstuffy?
Because!
Susan Alcorn, “Gilmor Blue,” Touch...
Saturday morning
Sounds arrive upon waking. A ceiling fan with a loose post squeaks overhead, so persistent it becomes an earth sound. The lake, which from this proximity looks flat, sends a low roll onto shore every two seconds. Crows stretch voice north and south while seagulls bleat quickly before landing on one of the boats moored out front. An endless wall of crickets projects. The refrigerator kicks on...
August 2010
8 posts
William Bronk, “The Nature of Musical...
Ingram Marshall, “Prelude - The Bay,”...
Pastor T. L. Barrett and the Youth For Christ...
Evan Caminiti, West Wind (Three Lobed, 2010)
A boat floats out into a mist. Fog rounds punctuated by open lanes parsed light and possibly drifting detritus. The pulsing water and dampening in the heavy air make placing sound difficult. But you hear dimensions across the water, some near, others far, some seeming placed and others scattered across space. When they quiet, or rather when you leave them, you think in delayed quintuplicate....
Clouwbeck (Richard Skelton), From Which the River...
Come the Aegir Faint footsteps fall on the leaves leading out of the pine wood, the path a tender of needles. This plush blanket holds the earth in place but suspends an incongruous train of change above. Wind breaks. Tamping feet and paws and claws. Feather drops. Pelting rain or pollen. Beyond a meadow, milkweed thrush cooing in a breeze now ages old. This whoosh. The river clearly in view now...
3 tags
Clouwbeck (Richard Skelton), From Which the River...
Richard Skelton’s latest work begins, as always, with the ritual of its packaging. A folded paper enclosure held closed by a vertical paper band bearing, longitudinally, the phrase thug taibhse gu dian an àiridh. At center a fragment in Ogham (an early Celtic form of inscription) that translates, if I am correct, as SRL, the initials Skelton has stand in for his Sustain-Release Private...
July 2010
13 posts
