Sight and Scene, by Listening Center

Sight and Scene

by Listening Center

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1.	Possessions Drawer 02:43	buy track
2.	Capture Errors 02:39	buy track
3.	Answering Service 00:56	buy track
4.	The Death Of Group D Meter 03:47 video	buy track
5.	Off Ramp 02:53	buy track
6.	Cold Panorama 03:58	buy track
7.	Transference One 02:41	buy track
8.	Visitor Information 03:21	buy track
9.	MK! Anton 00:33	buy track
10.	Wired Backwards 01:38	buy track
11.	Transport Diemna 03:10	buy track
12.	Randy's Matrix 04:02	buy track
13.	We’ll Use Each Other, Won’t We? 04:55 video	buy track

about

Sight and Scene is Listening Center’s twelfth album and first for Castles in Space. It was recorded by David Mason in the Hudson Valley, New York.

The album is a thematic exploration of 1970’s sci-fi aesthetics in film and TV through synthesis and magnetic recording. Analog modular and polyphonic synths were used extensively and were recorded directly to cassette or 1/4” tape. Much of the style of composition is familiar territory; micro-essays featuring rhythm sections bubbling beneath trademark Listening Center melodies. But there are also new departures — minimal interludes, a tape loop vignette, and several explorations of a more improvisatory nature. It finds Listening Center at a crossroads, integrating newly found textures into an already established direction. There are specific cinematic references which lurk more in intention and connotation than in any acts of direct sampling or emulation, and imaginary parallels are drawn between societal critiques of that period, and those of today. The album is also influenced by the communications theory of Marshall McLuhan (“The Medium is the Massage”) which asks questions of our relationship to technology which are ever more pertinent. Sight and Scene is finally a fiction involving a character of indeterminate identity who is being pulled apart by forces beyond their control — forces of time, psychology, and perhaps, gravity. Their efforts to remain integrated are ultimately futile but despite their fragmentation, they achieve a new point of view, however bleak.

The artwork was made by Rob Carmichael (SEEN studio), whose work Listening Center first came into contact with during 2012’s Restligeists/ The Twilight Language of Nigel Kneale cassette/monograph published by Sukhdev Sandhu’s Text und Töne imprint.

Two videos accompany the album, “The Death of Group D Meter” (filmed in North America and Ireland on Super 8 film by Mason),
and “We’ll Use Each Other, Won’t We” (Polaroid photography filmed on analog video by Mason)

Listening Center is an electronic sound projection imagined and realized by David K. Mason. Mason was born and grew up in Dublin, Ireland, was educated at Cologne Music Conservatory and The New School in New York, had a varied career as a jazz drummer and audio engineer, and came to form Listening Center around 2011 after hearing records by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Broadcast and the Ghost Box label. His interests in electronic music go back further — Mason became interested in early electronic and tape music after graduating college, and began to make electronic music on tape around 2001. Listening Center was fortunate to release tracks with Ghost Box in 2013, including “Titoli” on the 7” Study Series alongside Pye Corner Audio’s remix of “Town of Tomorrow” from Listening Center’s debut album Example One (initially
released by the Danish label This Is Care of and then later on vinyl by the legendary Polytechnic Youth), and a further two tracks on Ghost Box’s Other Voices series. A string of LPs followed with Dom Martin’s Polytechnic Youth label, including Cycles and Other Phenomena, Aural Assignments, Retrieving, and Cybernetic Window, in addition to several albums released on Mason’s own cassette and CD imprint, Temporary Tapes. During this time, Listening Center was a perennial contributor to the A Year In The Country series curated by Stephen Prince.

credits

released May 3, 2024

Recorded by David K. Mason, New York.
Mastered by Antony Ryan for RedRedPaw.
Artwork and design by Rob Carmichael for SEEN.
Packshots by Ruby Armstrong.

CiS132

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about

Listening Center New York, New York

Listening Center is an electronic sound projection imagined and realized by David K. Mason. Mason was born and grew up in Dublin, Ireland, was educated at Cologne Music Conservatory and The New School in New York, had a varied career as a jazz drummer and audio engineer, and came to form Listening Center in 2011. ... more

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