Myddyng by Fletcher Tucker
“Myddyng" is the Old Norse & Middle English predecessor of contemporary English’s “midden”. Middens are shell mounds, potshard piles, and compost heaps. Depositories for consumed, broken, and abandoned bits.
Tucker’s "Myddyng" is an assemblage of isolated and discarded components from his intricately arranged, animistic drone-folk record "Cold Spring". A spare, uncanny, remnant composition of field recordings, weird tape phantoms, exhumed melodies, and naked voices dug out of the fecund humous of his four-year "Cold Spring" recording process.
All recordings were made on cassette tape by Fletcher Tucker in Big Sur, California between January 2013 and January 2017. Assemblage made in Ojai, California, February 2019. "Myddyng" is an exclusively digital release.
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"Myddyng" notes from Fletcher Tucker
The Movements of this assemblage are as follows:
I. Glittering Mycelium – Made using a borrowed synth with a forgotten name
II. Upper Realm – Field recording of acorn woodpeckers, red-shouldered hawks, and thunder made on Partington Ridge, Big Sur
III. Ancestral Summons – Appalachian dulcimer played with a bow, attempting to evoke nyckelharpas and other arcane instruments of my Northern European ancestors
IV. Stone’s Voice – Isolated layers of singing from “Cloud-Hidden”, a few jays can be heard in the forest around my home
V. Dark Watchers – Half-erased phantom tape sounds
VI. Gateway – Thunder from Big Sur sky, distant pump organ from “I Became Smoke”
VII. River of Wind – Made with a Korg Monotribe, half of the soundscape comprising “Unborn Mind”
VIII. Lichen Eating Stone – Layers of alto saxophone and tape wobble that conclude “I Became Smoke”, saxophone performed by Rachael Schearer
IX. Burning Ruins – Unaccompanied voices from a verse of “Graveyard Gate”, sung with Molly Sarlé
X. Middle Realm – Spinning different lengths of ropes, playing cymbals, manipulating tape
XI. Bone’s Voice – Human singing and vocoder singing from “Descend”, the first rain of 2017 falls gently in the background
XII. Exhumed – Pump organ composition buried within “Buried on the Wind”
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.