Ten Impressions for Piano and Strings

Ten Impressions dates from the fall of 2010, when I moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I was contemplating starting Recital at this time, envisioning the first release to be a double-LP of my ambient, slow works. Amassing violin and piano fragments over the next months, I ended up with over 4 hours of recorded material. Well, then… I sat and looked at the files on my computer and lost all interest. An odd gapping period overtook me and I stopped working on music. Twiddling my time, my listening interest in classical and art-y avant grade music flourished. A year later, or so, I waded back to the pool of strings and keys and thought, “oh, well, some of these still feel nice.” So, I opened the chest again. I knew this would be the last 'ambient' record I would make for the foreseeable future (still mostly true). I sculpted them lightly, to a sort of pastoral American sadness. Working again on these pieces was familiar and easy. This was just before the obsessive editing microscope was glued above my eye (trying to tear it off, now, though). Ten Impressions is available as a clean CD now. I appreciate the confidence from Root Strata (who originally published this as an LP in 2015). So thank you Maxwell August Croy and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. This is my most Eno/Budd effort, and I feel the recordings stand well 10 years late. Not as an Eno/Budd record, but as a taste of what was before and, if I never got into Fluxus and Sound Poetry, what could have continued to happen. -Sean McCann, January 2020

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