Mara's Daughters

Steve Flato (b. 1983) is a musician whose primary focus is on composition with material sourced from improvisations of himself or collaborators. Flato is concerned with process, chance, and the line between improvisation and composition, synthetic and natural sounds. He is additionally concerned with impurity, taking processes and concepts and freely interchanging them without the process necessarily dictating form. Recent collaborators include Vanessa Rossetto (Hwaet), as well as Richard Kamerman and Corey Larkin (Fyxzis). His last solo release, 48v, can be heard on the net label Homophoni. Mara's Daughters is Flato's commentary on noise wall music and marks his first physical solo release. It was proudly the first release on the Mexican label Lengua de Lava. With interest in the limitations of the genre, Flato mixes the static walls of HNW with slow textural and harmonic changes, unabashedly influenced by Eliane Radigue. Largely culled from experiments using raw data found in electronic information, Mara's Daughters also employs open circuit radios and reel to reel tape manipulation. Mastered by Joe Panzner, the title track takes the listener through 43 minutes of slowly evolving harsh textures using recordings and samples 10 years in the making – recordings which have slowly evolved over time via various processing tactics. Side B, mastered by A.F. Jones, includes Mara’s Veils and Salton Sea, two long-form pieces which serve as counter-balance to Mara’s Daughters. Mara’s Veils is made up of raw data samples and includes a re-imagining from Jones of the source material for Mara's Daughters. Salton Sea offers a respite from the harsh sounds of Mara’s Daughters and Mara’s Veils, using ambient sounds recorded on location in the Salton Sea, an abandoned tourist locale in Southern California. The original cassette, in a limited edition of 48, was released in August 2014, and sold out in a few months.