The month of April will see both a Kranky Records showcase in Portland featuring Benoit Pioulard, Ethernet and Loscil, as well as a west coast tour spinning out of the Northwest dates with Marcus Fischer and Slowdive's Simon Scott. Most of us came to know Chicago's (now relocated to Portland) Kranky as the home of space and post-rock in the 1990's, everything from Low, to Labradford, to Godspeed! You Black Emperor and Stars of the Lid have found an audience through the label in decades past. In the time since they've become one of the defining American imprints for abstract electronic, drone and neo-classical music. Concurrently forays into ambient neo-folk like the work of Portland's Liz Harris as Grouper and Thomas Meluch's Benoit Pioulard project have been a rich vein they've also mined. A sound epitomized in the ambient idyl of "Sonnet", Meluch's venture into extended tone sculpting released earlier this month. The west coast tour through the latter half of April features a lineup including the solo venture of Slowdive's drummer and sound designer, Simon Scott. One only need hear the jazz-inflected, Angelo Badalamenti-like doomscapes of his excellent "Bunny" on the Miasmah label to recognize that his work is a significant entity outside the context of the formative shoegaze band. With "Below Sea Level" on John Wozencroft's Touch and Taylor Deupree's 12K label he further established his sound in the company of abstract guitar and electronics composers like Christian Fennesz and Tarantel's Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. Scott's labelmate Marcus Fischer who put in a finely detailed, melodic performance at the inaugural Substrata Festival has continued to develop his vocabulary of pointilist electronically processed acoustic and environmental sounds. The two making complimentary framing for the long-established Kranky artist Scott Morgan and his Loscil project. "Sea Island" released last winter, sees him extend the subterranean bass and open expanses of his melodic electronic music into even further abstraction and scale. Performed as an audio-visual multisensory experience, Loscil has reached a point of near total synergy of image and sound with this current live incarnation.
