59628 ringings ~. In preparation for the project Beyond sublargo, I set up a practice of improvising for an hour or two in my home studio, every day when possible, over a span of several months. A backlog of scraps from a period of more than ten years of collecting source material made it possible to reconnect with obsessions from the recent past, and combine some of them with fresher interests. The present release stands as a distilled segment of the results of this practice.

A consistent passion for me has been for the sound of struck metal, a bell for example, and early one morning as the sun was coming up, this came into sharper focus as I pulled in field recordings from last year’s journey to some of the historic monasteries of Russia’s Golden Ring. I reshaped and recontextualized them in ways that sidestep the overtly devotional, hopefully without entirely eliminating their emotional resonance.