Barreca / Leimer

Barreca / Leimer

Drowning Guides

Palace Of Lights

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...

Barreca / Leimer

Dual Mono

Palace Of Lights

Dual Mono is the third Barreca | Leimer collaboration. The process used for producing Dual Mono was designed to destabilize established habits and predilections in favor of responding to the music in at least subjectively new ways. It was also designed to reduce the illusion of control, to become more responsive to and accepting of unpredicted outcomes, and to give the music—as much as possible—a voice less tampered with. Each piece for Dual Mono was authored by only one of the participants, the other receiving MIDI data and being limited to revoicing the composition. With a general goal of maintaining a result that was somewhat, though not purely, minimalist in sympathy, each piece was then assembled in its final form by the originator, now limited to controlling relative levels, crossfades, editing and processing. The final fifteen pieces that span two CDs embrace a range of emergent, generative and traditional forms that express a calm, informed ambience amid unsettled, shifting soundscapes. Of an earlier collaboration, Textura stated “the sheer density of sound presented in representative settings such as ‘Loess’, ‘Talus’, and ‘Oram’ is incredible, and one comes away from Field Characteristics convinced that the claim regarding the hundreds of sounds involved in the recording’s presentation is clearly fact, not hyperbole.”

Barreca / Leimer

Field Characteristics

Palace Of Lights

Field Characteristics derives from the Marc Barreca | K. Leimer performance produced by Steve Peters for the Wayward Music series, presented 14 November 2014, at the Chapel performance space in Seattle. The audio originated from hundreds of independently recorded digital, electric, acoustic and found sounds. These fragments were edited, layered and reprocessed with Pro Tools and Ableton Live. The performance consisted of manipulating and mixing both live and prepared audio. Utilizing the same sources as well as recordings of the performance, Field Characteristics represents a further extrapolation of the material. CD includes an 8-page booklet of images used in the performance. Field Characteristics followed the first Barreca | Leimer album, Premap, released in 2014.