Music Today by Fountainsun
Fountainsun is the new work of Daniel Higgs and Fumie Ishii. Their debut LP, Music Today, is a bright and expressive blend of percussion, strings, flutes, voices, and a tumult of poetry rumbling out from the very center of The Big Bang, traversing eons of song.
Music Today transmits impressions of lush and varied regions, distant and present eras. One could picture our troubadours 3,000 years in the past with flute and drum in hand wandering across grassy hills, playing merry tunes that make the bamboo sway in time. Or they may be seated in the temple chamber of an interstellar ship, composing music to the entropic spin of distant galaxies.
Just as the sounds of many times and places mingle joyfully here, so too the masculine and feminine energies dance and play in a prismatic yin yang. Volatile banjo pluckings send a shower of sparks over full-bodied organic rhythms. Bombastic cymbal waves crash in the tranquil pools of many layered nylon-string guitars. Caverns of authoritative voices make way for one singer softly cooing. What is graceful and intuitive harmonizes with what is meticulous and definitive. The overarching balances the intimate. The tender compliments the surreal.
Two beautiful songs on this album ("Old Pine Tree" and "Only One") were written entirely by Fumie... the rest of the lyrics were culled from a single epic poem by Daniel. This literary thru-line lends the album a hypnotic continuity, allowing for maximum stylistic musical explorations that never dim the intense focus and cohesion of the work.
Recorded over the course of several weeks on one-inch tape in a glass house in Big Sur, California. Eleven songs and recitations appear here sung and chanted at times by Daniel and Fumie together, and in some instances solo... but they never seem to sing or play alone. Instead we sing with them, knowing the songs already, as we know all things most ancient and forever new.
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Gnome Life Records is a vinyl and cassette label based on the unceded ancestral homelands of the Esselen in present day Big Sur, California. Established in 2005, Gnome Life produces a wide variety of musical and poetic releases expressing wild and mystical perspectives.