little feats by Short Americans

Little Feats is a quiet abandonment of answers and exactitudes. A slow luxuriation in the riddle, the failure, the irredeemably off-kilter. Despite these four compositions pulling from different thematic sources, all are bound by a spaciousness that continually strands us between the conclusion of the last gesture and the commencement of the next. Great swathes of the record are compositionally “silent”, with the instruments falling away to reveal the album’s irreducible base: a field-recorded ravelling of circulating air, distant traffic noise, creaks of resettled player posture, nasal breaths and other such greyed and faint audio ephemera, from which the instruments tentatively materialise and to which they gently return. Guitar notes descend into the interference like seals sliding into the water. The drones of brass and accordion reduce to rasps of expelled air, and then disperse into the hissing void. There are no resolutions here – just a constant reconfiguration of the question, collapsing into absence each time.

We find this endless postponement within Noah Ophoven-Baldwin’s “Tuning” pieces, during which the instruments confront the impossibility of assimilating into a single pitch – the closer they get, the more vividly we perceive their inherent discrepancies. Max Wanderman’s “Midwestern Gradient” seems to transpose this principle to the topography of natural landscapes, with long tones carried through endless glissandic swoops and droops, as if remarking upon the real-world absence of absolute geographic flatness. Adam Zahller’s piece “The Devil’s Questions” is a deconstruction of John Jacob Niles’ writings on a riddling folk ballad, the sung verses splayed across several minutes, holding us in prolonged states of dusty, diabolical obfuscation. Luke Martin’s “Anamnesis” feels like an attempt to articulate the group’s own collaborative dynamic, arranging the sound sources – cassettes, objects, instruments – into strange and illegible symbols that hang in the air before dissolving. One meaning of “anamnesis” is the recollection of knowledge acquired prior to birth, which aligns with the album’s tendency to probe for answers that defy a reduction to earthly terms. Short Americans always return to that irreducible hiss of unadorned space, surrendering the solidity of the known to embrace the quiet bristle of the unfathomable.

-- Jack Chuter

“Flaming Pines is itself a topography of hidden global sounds." The Wire.

We are a label focused on field recording, sound art and experimental ambient music.

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