Description:
Opening in mist, with disassembled activity both hidden and continuous, Seas Between is a work containing the solemnity of temporality, trembling tenderness, and the brightest side of sightless imagination. Corey Fuller was born in the United States, but while still very young, he relocated with his family to Japan, where he spent the next 20 years, before returning to the United States to live in Washington state. December of 2009 marks the release of his first solo album, and his return to Japan with his own family, to live and work. The album represents both a literary and imaginative vision of home and the distances between, a document of the placement and creation of a convolved third-culture reality.
Seas Between was created using an expansive assortment of acoustic instruments, including piano, prepared piano, Rhodes electric piano, pipe organ, pump organ, vibraphone, pianica, accordion, acoustic/electric guitars, Gamelan bells, Thai finger cymbals, assorted percussion, and found objects. Field recordings were given delicate attention, including room tones, contact microphones, hydrophone recordings of both shores of the Pacific Ocean, field recordings from Japan and Washington, reel to reel tapes, cassette tapes, and analog tape delays. Custom software was also employed to create a convolved, indeterminate blend of instruments, with field recordings from both sides of the Pacific Ocean, above and below.
In addition to palette, a group of collaborative musicians contributed work, such as John Friesen on Cello, Tyler Wilcox on saxophones and bass clarinet, and Tomoyoshi Date on piano and electronics. Their contributions further complete a graceful warmth, to an already startlingly pronounced recording of poetic allusion, uncertain acceptance, and hazed mystery.
Throughout the 45-minute work, clarity is demonstrated through swelling, warm tones, acute instrumentation, combined with the chill of the ocean breeze, and the indistinguishable traits of swirling, impermanent images. Beside crisp crescendos of the early morning dawn, foamy field recordings are hidden in the fine clouds; a formed, thin film, hidden in winter’s winds. In Seas Between, here falls the shadow, between essence and descent, longing and fulfillment, wholeness and brokenness. The sense of separation and constant longing is ever-present, in our surroundings that are unwavering, but often unpredictable as the sea.
-text by Will Long (Celer)
Reviews:
Best of 2010 Lists:
Nicola Catalano, It’s a Trap! (Tobias Hellkvist)
Best of 2009 Lists:
A-Music (mondii), Students of Decay, Earlabs.org, Headphone Commute.com, Ryonkt, Will Long
This time in the SoundVault we focus on another, recent album from Yann Novak’s strong label Dragon’s Eye Recordings. A breath-taking full-release debut for Corey Fuller it was too on the heel of 2009, a Japan-based, US-born musician who has spent his life shifting between Japan and the US, and it is this part of his background which is center of attention for namely Seas Between – namely relating to the musician’s own life in each location and the sea as a separation of his different habitats.
The music of Fuller is also an exciting amalgation of western-sounding electronica which often is tinkered with more mature-sounding, serious melancholy, and on the other hand the Japanese and eastern-sounding electronica, which has a sound nestled in something more uplifting, playful and with childlike curiousity, nourishing the infant and its wondrous outlook on the world. Fuller, currently residing in Bellingham, WA, draws on experiences from his two homes and though separated by a vast sea, adjoins the cultures of both to create a vivid-sounding story of both warmth and personal depth despite the international distance, and it is also this sea – The Pacific – which is the one constant as Fuller has relocated from time to time and the musician himself cites like a place of familiarity.
As a collaborator and handling mastering for several of his peers, like Celer, Mathieu Ruhlmann, Chihei Hatakeyama and Tomoyoshi Date (aka. other half of Opitope with aforementioned Hatakeyama), Corey Fuller has a wide range of influences to draw upon in this respect too. The latter two also work under monikers Kaikoka and Kuukoka with Fuller and at Soundscaping expectations are high for each respective group’s first release. Back to ‘Seas Between’, it is evidently geographical location which is key, taking in elements of rural Japan and melded with the austerity of native US. Instrumentation is an array of both field recordings and carefully processed acoustic instruments like piano and guitars, the Rhodes and the accordion, and lots of percussive elements (gongs, bells, vibraphones, etc.). Although often these sounds are processed to sustaining tones that take on the characteristics of each other and are somewhat difficult to distinguish and yield a bleed of warm sounds as a result, the process of convolution as cited by Fuller, rather than mixing or layering the sounds recorded in each of the two locations.
Watch out for more music from Fuller this year as we eagerly anticipate the collaboration album with Chihei Hatakeyama, “Euphotic” bound for release on Infraction Records sometime soon.
– Soundscaping
Growing discomfort: A bold statement backed up by the personal history of the artist.
Cosy warmth, an atmosphere of sweetness and welcome, a magnifying glass looking into emotions and blowing them almost out of proportion, translating them at the same time into feelings of comfort, a retreat into the safety of a mother’s womb… After being agreeably introduced this way, the listener might even assume to be subjected to musical surroundings of a new-age-like-disposition. But then, irritatingly slow and nonetheless with a shocking effect, select elements are deteriorating into disharmony. At first, one merely notices this through the ever-so-slight asymmetries in modulation swelling out of the speakers. Tiny fractions of frequential disharmony are emitting waves of sound irregularly altering the harmonic field just enough to create a sensation of discomfort. And then this discomfort just keeps growing …
This, in a nutshell, is the basic concept of Corey Fuller’s latest work, and in my opinion it reflects an important part of his life. A bold statement, it is backed up by the personal history of the artist: At the age of seven, Fuller’s parents decided to move to Japan. Being born in the US, Corey had already experienced enough of the characteristics of his native country to make out the differences with his ‘new’ life in Nippon: Differences in culture, differences in social behaviour, differences in traditions and customs must have irritated him, to say the least.
Memories of home and a sentimental and sad farewell are cogenially reflected by minutely arranged sounds. ‘Late Summer’ opens the story as though it were a mystic sage, words seemingly radiating from an ancient voice of wisdom. And yet, disharmonic hints seem to foretell the threatening departure into a new and unknown world, a forced good-bye to home. It perfectly reflects what must have gone through the boy’s mind with departure imminent.
Consequently, the next track (‘November Skies Tokyo’) tells the story that unfolds after arriving in Japan, a steady tone of harmonic and intense quality being only slightly altered over the course of the track’s duration. The oscillating nuances contained within this harmony tell a tale of overwhelming impressions, of not yet being able to distinguish and sort out this new life. ‘Of A Winter Dawn’ takes us into another phase of this suddenly changed life of young Corey. Field Recordings of heavy boots crushing freshly fallen snow turn into a rhythmical stumping slowly and very delicately adorned by harmonies adding a sense of increasing pleasure, not really to the extent of overwhelming joy, but still… A base of comfort seems to have been established.
The concluding title track marks the end of this sentimental journey. Lugubrious and melancholic melodies make us intensely feel the homesickness and grief of someone being too young to determine his own life and being forced into a new, unknown and thus ominous environment without really having a choice. The sounds of small waves rolling onto a beach accompanied by the characteristic cries of seagulls and sea lions may be a reflection of the old homeland. A homeland, that is far, far away with seas between…
This is one of those albums aiming straight at the heart. Corey Fuller tells this story, his story, in a touching and unique way. Don’t miss it.
– Tokafi
L’immagine dei mari di mezzo è il segno dell’impermanenza e della serendipità che caratterizzano la musica dell’americano Corey Fuller nel suo album d’esordio per la Dragon’s Eye Recordings. Una vita trascorsa in continuo andirivieni tra gli Stati Uniti e il Giappone, e la relativa sensazione di sentirsi mai a casa, estraneo in ogni luogo, stato d’animo che inevitabilmente tracima e invade i materiali di “Seas Between”. Ambient music di estrema rarefazione e vischiosità, un letargico intervento manipolatorio, via field recordings, microfoni a contatto, registrazioni con idrofoni e trattamenti vari, che avvolge come una pellicola trasparente o, meglio ancora, aderisce come una seconda pelle ai suoni prodotti acusticamente dall’autore o dai suoi occasionali collaboratori (John Friesen al violoncello e Tomoyoshi Date al pianoforte, oltre che all’elettronica, nella title track d’impianto para-cameristico, Tyler Wilcox ai sassofoni e al clarinetto basso in Late Summer, tra le pagine più efficaci del disco). Ma tutto il lavoro è capace di grandi suggestioni, sia quando l’articolazione risulta eccezionalmente circostanziata nelle composizioni su lunga distanza (i due episodi già citati), sia che la medesima alterità venga espressa con laconica asciuttezza come avviene nei tre minuti scarsi dell’iniziale Winds May Scatter. (8)
– Blow Up Magazine
In 1983 at the age of five, Fuller relocated with his family from the United States to Tokyo, where he spent the next twenty years of his life. Afterwards, ingrained with a cultural duality, Fuller continued to bounce back and forth across the Pacific until finally settling in Bellingham, Washington. Evidently, the idea of home for Fuller has been an emotionally divided one. Seas Between is a longplayer created to capture the “intercontinental distance” between the US and Japan which no doubt bears a massive metaphorical underlying for Fuller on a personal level. One hardly needs a Sofia Coppola film to illustrate the magnitude of cultural discrepancy between the Tokyo metropolis and the United States, and such a culture-clash upbringing went a long way to informing Fuller’s artistic vision and subsequent conception of Seas Between.
Released on the Los Angeles-based Dragon’s Eye, the home of several notable sound art contemporaries such as Ian Hawgood, Celer, and FOURM (aka B.G. Nichols of Level), Seas Between blends an ambitious catalogue of sonic material, including an array of instruments, field recordings, and computer-generated synthesis. The stylistic theme of Seas Between—the coexistence of field recordings and processed instrumental fragments—melds rather seamlessly between pieces. Fuller employs a myriad of instruments (accordion, guitars, piano, Rhodes electric piano, temple bells, vibraphone, glockenspiel) but leaves only traces to be discerned after heavy refinement through processing, assemblage, and convolution, a technique of which Fuller seems to be quite a proponent. At the same time, the album is littered with sounds of cicada, rustling elm trees, the Tokyo subway, rain of the Pacific Northwest, and the restlessness of the dividing Pacific itself.
The pieces generally follow a similar vein, differentiated by employing some combination of the effects and the processed reproductions of the instruments mentioned above. Highlights include the epic “Late Summer,” a glittery harmonic requiem for cicadas dominated by eerily sparse howls and intermittent bass; “November Skies Tokyo,” a layering of elongated tones that take a five-minute span to coalesce; and “Snow Static,” a lovingly crafted, whispery delicate product of guitar, melodica, and snow field recordings. The closer, the title track, is somewhat of a pattern breaker, surrendering a bit of the preceding subtlety and instead is simply a slow piece of melodic instrumental music with the bowing of strings and the tapping of piano ivories. It’s a pleasant anomaly, but an anomaly nonetheless, not really fulfilling any greater purpose in the context of the record.
Seas Between is a comfortable record, putting the listener at tremendous ease to savour a pleasant listen. Though one could hardly pinpoint if Fuller has any interest in breaking technical ground, it is equally difficult to really fault any particular facet of this work. The downside is that it lacks that certain memorability and punch to ever be elevated beyond just that, a pleasant listen. Nevertheless, it registers all the right emotive cues to deliver a charming, contemplative experience that is reinforced by the personal dimension instilled by Fuller’s history.
– The Silent Ballet
The newcomer here is Corey Fuller, US-born sound artist, who relocated to Japan when young, spent 20 years there before eventual return to the US, and now lives back in Japan. Beyond biography, this informs Seas Between’s concept – articulated as an imagining, not just of home and its interposed distances, but ‘a document of the placement and creation of a convolved third-culture reality.’ Certainly more of a delicate meditative affair than the DE house style, it makes much of its array of instrumentation – piano (plain, prepared and Rhodes), organ (pipe, pump), pianica, accordion, guitars, Gamelan bells, Thai finger cymbals, assorted percussion, and found objects; other musicians bring cello (John Friesen), saxophones and bass clarinet (Tyler Wilcox), and piano (Tomoyoshi Date). From its misty opening, its tones tend toward the tender and winsome end of electronic expression, the likes of “Snow Static” seeming to channel the tenuousness of the temporal, the ambivalence of location and its readiness to turn to yearning. There’s a comparative purity of sound at work here, though trappings of DE present in the form of field recordings, diversely sourced and mediated – room tones, contact mikes deployed in Japan and Washington, hydrophonic captures from both shores of the Pacific, reel-to-reel and cassette tapes, analog tape delays. A sonic modelling of oceanic drift and swirling breezes is suggested, as on “Of a Winter Dawn”. Somewhat reined in and polite next to the textural gruzz and fuzz of DE elders Novak, Drouin et al, the set seeks a locus of feeling – linking the emotional and geographical, in sensations of separation and longing.
– Furthernoise
Seas Between’s title references the fact that after being born in the United States, Corey Fuller and his family relocated to Japan for twenty years before returning to the US to live in Washington State. The collection is therefore significant not only for being his first solo album but for also marking Fuller’s recent return to Japan with his own family to live and work. It’s hardly accidental that Fuller references the natural world explicitly in the titles of the pieces, as Seas Between is anything but a series of hermetic electronic works assembled in the sterile confines of a studio. Using a multitude of instruments and field recordings, Fuller transmutes the beauty and mystery of the natural realm—seasons, locales, elements—into forty-four minutes of ravishing ambient sounds. Sometimes that occurs literally—amidst the gleam of ambient organ tones in “Of a Winter Dawn,” for example, one hears the crunch one associates with trodding through a landscape freshly covered with snow, or the crackle of a campfire at a wintry setting during “Snow Static”—but more often than not the effect is created by way of allusion, with the material indirectly hinting at a place lodged in Fuller’s memory.
Included among the acoustic instruments he used in producing the material are acoustic and electric piano, pipe organ, pump organ, vibraphone, accordion, guitars, Gamelan bells, Thai finger cymbals, assorted percussion, and found objects. Custom software was employed to blend the sounds, including field recordings (room tones, contact microphones, hydrophone recordings of the Pacific Ocean, field recordings from Japan and Washington, etc.). The recording is dramatically elevated by the presence of three guest musicians, cellist John Friesen, woodwinds player Tyler Wilcox, and pianist Tomoyoshi Date, all of whom make substantial contributions to the pieces on which they appear.
Slowly coming into view with a web of gleaming organ tones, sparse piano musings, and field noises, “Winds May Scatter” inaugurates a recording that deserves to be heard in listening numbers far greater than the 250 copies that have been made available. During “Late Summer,” minimal bass tones anchor a whistling stream of electric piano accents and electronics for fourteen contemplative minutes. Wilcox’s bass clarinet floats along the music’s surface too, prodding its ever-so-gentle movement forward. The album’s most beautiful piece is the title composition, which turns into a nine-minute outpouring of melancholy when Friesen’s cello playing is added to Fuller’s expansive sound design. It’s a tremulous ambient setting of poetic force and ethereal beauty that conveys a sense of longing for home, a longing that in Fuller’s case is especially pronounced when such ties have rooted themselves so powerfully in not locale but two.
– Textura
At Dragon’s Eye Recordings they seem to have an eye for unknown musicians in the field of ambient music with a specific attention for field recordings. For example earlier this year we had the pleasure to review the debut album by the musician Sublamp. And now they present us Corey Fuller, a musician residing in Japan but with his roots in the US. Before he this musician worked with Greg Davis and Loving Space Kindergarten, but Seas Between is his first solo offer.
The music by Fuller shimmers between electro-acoustic and field recordings. On one side he uses a huge arsenal of acoustic and semi-acoustic instruments, while on the other side the computer is processing these in to synthesized sounds. Not always are the original sources recognized, while at others you can clearly hear a piano play. With the rich sound palette Fuller uses he creates dense, warm music reminding of the small tender moments in life. For this to happen he makes use of several layered melodies that playfully get along. With the small progressions a soundscape is created that flows like the sea. This kind of music might not be new at all, but because of the rich sound color and the lovely transgressions you hear all the time this release really stands out among some of the best in the genre. I am surprised that before this release we never heard of Corey Fuller in his solo project. There is a talent in this musician, a man with a mind for small details, but not loosing the big picture either. You can hear this very well in the classical music based title track. While small changes occur all the time, also in the bigger picture the music flows slightly to it’s own small climax. The used cello sounds create a lovely melancholic melody, which together with the piano does remind of the work by Sigur Rós, while in the background loads of small sounds fill in the small gaps. A gorgeous piece on a surprising good album.
Seas Between is one of my favorite albums over 2009 and stands out above a lot of other releases in today’s ambient world. Do yourself a pleasure and go grab yourself of this limited release.
– Earlabs
American native Corey Fuller (33) is a sound artist who spent 20 years in Japan and now is based in Washington State released his debut full-length album on San Francisco’s based Dragon’s Eye label. On “Seas Between” he uses an array of acoustic and electronic devices, a varied percussion instruments, field recordings and found objects. Also collaborate for this album John Friesen on cello, Tyler Wilcox on saxophones and brass clarinet, and Tomoyoshi Date on piano and electronics. The last track that gives the name to the album summarize the combination of organic and synthetic sounds gives the album warm tones, drifting drones, fine textures and moreover a gorgeous atmosphere.
– Loop
Here we have another quite simply gorgeous album from Dragon’s Eye. A splendid way to finish off the year and a really superb piece of craftsmanship from Corey Fuller. Using a melodic and wistful style of instrumentation he’s conjured up some magical atmospheres that range from lush drones and swathes of texture right through to a more structured and composed sound. Both fit perfectly together and the blend is exquisite I must say. From soothing cello passages and on into gentle piano shimmers, this will grab you from the off and keep you listening all the way to the end. Combining field recordings into the mix as a background texture all of its own, you get a sense of space and natural wonder as the chord layers ebb and flow. When they soar it’s a deeply uplifting feeling and when it settles down into a more subtle state it hits just the right note for some introspective, meditative thinking. Every aspect of this work has been put together with finesse, love and style and I think you’re going to be just as wowed by it as I am. It’s a pastoral, sparkling, lavishly ambient selection of tracks for you to treasure. Absolutely superb.
– Smallfish
