Mouths Without A Head, by Reinier Van Houdt

Mouths Without A Head

by Reinier Van Houdt

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Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

Album purchase also includes a digital booklet with liner notes and images from Reinier van Houdt.

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Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Comes in a 4-panel cardboard eco-pack. Digital Booklet included. Edition of 200 copies.

Includes unlimited streaming of Mouths Without A Head via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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€12 EUR or more

1.	Unadorned, Unperfumed 00:42	buy track
2.	A Burnt Page 02:24	buy track
3.	Portal 01:39	buy track
4.	Ignore the Path 04:05	buy track
5.	The Curtain is the Canvas 01:47	buy track
6.	Unraveling Dirt 02:47	buy track
7.	Clouds 03:36	buy track
8.	The Agony of Falling 07:00	buy track
9.	A Dirge for Gravity 04:35	buy track
10.	Choral Maze 03:32	buy track
11.	Presocratic Grid 09:58	buy track
12.	Broken Vessel 02:08	buy track
13.	Mouths Without A Head 03:01	buy track
14.	Lazarus Reversed 04:26	buy track
15.	Annihilation (by leaving everything intact) 04:53	buy track

about

Music composed in resonance with Orlando di Lasso’s ‘Prophetiae Sibyllarum’ (ca 1555-60).

The Sibylline Prophecies are a 16th century collection of vocal motets that could be considered prophetic, because they open up the music of its time to chromaticism beyond diatonality, posing new challenges to tuning. On the other hand, the sung text is an unambiguous appropriation of ancient Greek Sibylline oracles, claiming these predicted the coming of Christ —a fictional revision of history that misses the revolutionary moment of prophecy, where an existing situation is broken open, made unstable, is destroyed even, and for a moment a desert looms in which every world, past or future, vanishes like a mirage. But, at the same time, here anything seems possible; it’s a challenge to start walking paths, instead of fixating on settlement and taking root.

As a kind of recuperation of this revolutionary moment I decided to read Lasso’s music the way an oracle might, adopting methods for divining earth, sky, fire, water, and using them for transforming the music in all different directions.

« When speech becomes prophetic it is not the future that is given, it is the present that is taken away, and with it any possibility of a firm, stable, lasting presence... It is once again like the desert, and speech is desert-like, this voice that needs the desert, to cry out and to reawaken the terror, understanding and memory of the desert... » (Maurice Blanchot)

—Reinier Van Houdt

credits

released May 7, 2021

Reinier van Houdt. Piano, stutter therapy tapes, field recordings, radio, synthesizers, guitars, fender rhodes.

Recorded and mixed by Reinier van Houdt in January and February 2021.

Mastered by A.F. Jones, Laminal Audio.

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about

Discreet Editions Rotterdam, Netherlands

A record label exploring interactions between experimental contemporary and historically-informed aesthetics in music.

discreet-editions.com

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