Danny Clay' Stills is the debut release of the art / music imprint Iikki, a sister to the Eilean record label, and is an impressive album that is not to be missed.
The music of Stills follows on from his Ganymede release for Hibernate – an album that was certainly one of, if not the, best release from Clay to date and certainly one of the strongest minimal electronic / ambient releases of 2015. That album was built around Clay’s manipulations of the first few bars of a Schubert piece and his attempts to stretch it out into an album’s worth of music.
Much like Stills, Ganymede was an experiment in personal memory and finding the infinite in something finite. On Stills, the music is composed by Clay based on his own playing and, thus, less overtly experimental. But, again, where Ganymede and Stills intersect is in the use of sonic manipulations to add a further layer of distillation to the sound at play. Stills is crowded by the sound of tape hiss and warble and it gives the music a sense of history that very much locates the physical act of making and recording the music to the experience of the listener hearing those sounds. It’s somehow very much the product or a particular moment in time but timeless as well.

Danny Clay is a composer and sound artist from Ohio, currently based in San Francisco. His works frequently utilize open forms, archival media, found objects, toy instruments, analogue and digital errata, family history, graphic notation, and the everything-in-between. He has released music on Hibernate Recordings, Patient Sounds, Unknown Tone Records, Phinery, Parlour Tapes+, and Eilean Rec., among others.