Barreca / Leimer Drowning Guides CD

Marc Barreca and Kerry Leimer have worked on a nearly parallel musical course for more than forty years. Nearly parallel because their musical paths do occasionally cross. First in 1980 with "Four Pages From An Unfinished Novel" on K. Leimer's first solo album Closed System Potentials. Again during the live performance of Music For Land And Water and for the massive loop piece "Heart Of Stillness" from The Neo-Realist (At Risk) by the virtual group Savant. Beyond basic file sharing, their recordings resolve tensions between distinct extremes of restrictive rules, defined procedures, improvisation, conscientious editing, and an ear for expansive details and contrasts. Their collaborative process is intended to subvert traditional and accepted methods of composition, instrumental voicing, signal processing, recording, and mixing with the goal of generating music that lives on the boundaries between established practice and profound impracticalities. The search for new compositional approaches continues with Drowning Guides. The fourth album by K. Leimer and Marc Barreca deliberately limits their collaborative exchange to re-voicing MIDI tracks. All audio was then returned to the originator to process, edit, mix and finalize the form. The music of Drowning Guides fixates on shifting textures and voices drawn through layers of processing and manipulation, emerging as a complete and distinct audio language. "This isn't just superficial commentary on the track listing: this is how it sounds, and how it reflects the new working method, where one participant establishes the basics and the other qualifies and adapts them. It's actually extremely involving and in almost every case, very beautiful." -Brian Morton, The Wire