★Preservation
Almond
Since the release of Saddleback’s acclaimed 2004 debut Everything’s A Love Letter, Tony has found increasing demand for his touch behind the recording desk. Tony’s studio is housed in his Kangaroo Valley residence on the south coast of New South Wales. Found inside are all sorts of instruments including various guitars, percussion makers, horns, a clarinet, a double bass, piano and a specially-fashioned drum set. Having arranged and played these on other peoples’ work – most notably for Sydney’s…
Night maps
Since the release of Saddleback’s acclaimed 2004 debut Everything’s A Love Letter, Tony has found increasing demand for his touch behind the recording desk. Tony’s studio is housed in his Kangaroo Valley residence on the south coast of New South Wales. Found inside are all sorts of instruments including various guitars, percussion makers, horns, a clarinet, a double bass, piano and a specially-fashioned drum set. Having arranged and played these on other peoples’ work – most notably for Sydney’s…
Everything's A Love Letter
Saddleback is the solo project for producer Tony Dupé. In many ways, with its warm and exploratory craft, Everything’s A Love Letter is the culmination of the varying strands in Tony’s musical life.Tony first came to notice in Glovebox, who put an ethereal, ambient twist on the indie-pop scene as far back as the early ‘90s. Glovebox’s swirling sound has been as unhurried as its release schedule, though no matter how spare their output, each album has always found a warm reception. The group were…
Bones
After playing bass with Rodan, pioneers of post-rock and post-hardcore, the long-respected and much-lauded Tara Jane ONeil has formed bands like The Sonora Pine and Retsin and has collaborated with Sebadoh, Papa M, Come, Low and Ida. Her first two solo albums for the Quarterstick label (Calexico, Rachels, June of ‘44), Peregrine and In The Sun Lines drew great acclaim for a rich musical tapestry The Wire has called “evocative dream music”. Consistently on the move, ONeil records all over the US,…
Smudge Another Yesterday
Pimmon is the alias for electronic composer Paul Gough. In the last decade, Pimmon has forged an international reputation for creating dense, challenging and engaging electronic music. Smudge Another Yesterday is Pimmon’s first full length release in five years. This release picks up and goes further from the point where the acclaimed Secret Sleeping Birds left off. Smudge Another Yesterday is an exploration of the song behind the noise; the secret whispers hidden in the static. Within these vas…
Beeswax Ephemera
The Preservation label presents Beeswax Ephemera from Iowa City guitarist Evan Miller. With one eye on the future and one on the past, his playing has considerable technical and abstract expanse, though retains a wonderful melodic sensibility upfront. Evan’s experimental leanings give Beeswax Ephemera an idiosyncratic quality that mark an inventive new talent in the world of artists taking guitar music into exciting new directions. These nominally earthy compositions take flight with the undenia…
The Temporal Wheel
For all intents and purposes, Grand Salvo is the work of singer-songwriter Paddy Mann. Grand Salvo’s debut album, 1642-1727, and its follow-up, River Road, earned him rave reviews and a solid following at home and beyond for his stark, sensitive and beautiful songs. After a spell living in Europe, Paddy returned to Australia and began work on another album he’d dreamt up while away, A set of songs that acts as a children’s storybook, the album became cursed with too many recording problems and P…
Soil Creatures
The name under which Melbourne singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Paddy Mann records and performs, Grand Salvo has quietly and unassumingly developed a body of work that has inspired both hardcore devotion and more recently, wider recognition, stemming from his previous album, Death. The ambitious fairytale orchestration received rave reviews from all over the country. With Soil Creatures, Grand Salvo has returned with no less scope but sits within quieter surroundings. This gorgeous s…
Chautauqua
Aaron not only surprised many with his 2007 debut Almond but gained great notices worldwide. The album set him on a course of many collaborations, and has since worked with a diverse array of artists, including Machinefabriek, Dawn Smithson (Jessamine, Sunn O))) and Jasper TX. His second album, River Water, proved a darkly compelling turn and stands as a forebear to Chautauqua in its pursuit of a distillation of pure emotional range, poised at the meeting point of intensity, calm and resolution.…
From The Ground
The Preservation label presents From The Ground, the debut album from Portland, Oregon’s Heather Woods Broderick. Growing up in the relative quiet of the Maine countryside while learning a range of instruments and being sung to sleep by her parents playing folk songs, natural and rural sounds became central to Heather’s sense of song, falling into a deeply personal realm.
The subtlety and nuance in Heather’s music also comes from her inclination towards ambient and experimental sounds, con…
From here to there
The Preservation label presents From Here To There, the debut album from San Francisco’s Ben Swire. While From Here To There can sit snugly in the canon of electronica, it’s played out with expansive vision and immediate warmth. Woven together with a deft sense of minimalism and melody using double bass, interlocking guitars and crisp percussion, the use of live instrumentation against densely layered field recordings finds great balance between elasticity and deep ambient underpinnings. The acc…
Nuojuva halava
The Preservation label presents Nuojuva Halava, the debut album from Helsinki, Finland’s Ous Mal. Ous Mal is the recording project for 22-year old Olli Aarni. With previous CD-R releases for both Finland’s 267-Lattajjaa and the UK’s Under The Spire, Ous Mal has already gained fine notice for his expansive sound, further developed in widescreen ways on Nuojuva Halava, his first full-length. Finding common ground between the dusty tenor of old-school hip hop cassettes and the fog of deep ambience …
Becalmed
Becalmed is the debut album from Sydney pianist Sophie Hutchings, recorded between two different settings: one with engineer Tim Whitten, best known for his work with The Necks, and one with Tony Dupe, who records on the preservation label as Saddleback. Becalmed isn't an entirely solo affair, and you'll hear Hutchings' family and friends helping her out with violin, cello and percussion - all elements that greatly help bring these recordings to life. Beautifully recorded, elegiac and romantic c…
Stand Before Me, Oh My Soul
Preservation's latest captures Italian experimentalist, Fabio Orsi in hungry, visceral form. Joined by Rich Baker's original drum loops, Fabio plays guitar, keyboards, voice and effects on eight relatively short, one might even say poppy, rock postures within an immersive ambient sound sphere. Considering that he's best known for lushly textured drone and ambient works 'Stand Before Me, Oh My Soul' is a hugely confident sideways shift into a new realm of more aggressive sonics with a def…
Map Of Circular Thought
The Preservation label presents Map of Circular Thought from Providence, Rhode Island’s Area C. Area C is the music project for composer and multi-media artist Erik Carlson. Carlson has recently completed the soundtrack to a National Geographic documentary on New Orleans in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, and has worked on several projects for NASA’s Space Grant Consortium along with numerous audio, multi-media and public art installations. Map of Circular Thought follows severa…
Thoughts Melt In The Air
The Preservation label presents Thoughts Melt In The Air, the second album from the pairing of Italian composers Fabio Orsi and Valerio Cosi. Both Orsi and Cosi have become recognized widely internationally for their prolific solo output and kindred spirits in creating momentous soundscapes that ring with lyrical feeling. Still in his early 20s, Valerio Cosi has released a seemingly endless stream of work that swirls around giddily in a sweep of heady free-jazz (his main instrument is tenor saxo…
The Long Afternoon Of Earth
The latest Preservation release hails from the USA's Midwest, featuring a double helping of songs from multi-instrumentalist and lo-fi folkster Clare Adrienne Cameron Hubbard. Although each CD is only an EP's length, the two sets of songs have been divided to denote the stylistic differences between sets, even though Hubbard's songwriting tone remains steady throughout. On the first disc Caethua evokes the raw intimacy of Diane Cluck, occasionally augmenting her spindly acoustic guitar accompani…
Ode
Brand new solo release for guitarist Nicola Ratti with his languid, disarming sound of small and gentle gestures and loping rhythms, often repeated and subtly shifting in an impressionistic vision founded on traditional elements. Merging guitar, piano and double bass with percussion, environmental sounds and occasional voice, Nicola constructs songs that by turns float, swell and envelop in magnetic fashion. A piercing tenderness remains at the core of his work, though on Ode there is a more exp…