Leimer, K.

Leimer, K.

Obligations

Palace Of Lights

Obligations is sound settled as work-in-progress. The set assembles 11 pieces produced over two years of the daily practice and pursuit of music free of the considerations necessary for assembling a consistent album. Most of these tracks evolved during work for The Starting Errors and Spall and were left out of those releases due to style, theme, pace, and timbral fit. Or, as Peter Hammill has put it, these pieces "went self-deterministic”. Obligations is music that emerged from spontaneous experimentation and play in search of novel sounds and structures, with non-binding tryouts for audio manipulation, processing, and editing. The pieces owe their existence to Leimer’s commitment to daily studio work, exercises designed to yield quality from quantity. While typically calm and slow, these tracks have been collected in the same spirit as The Faust Tapes or Cheer Accident’s Fringements series in their juxtaposition and self-contained quality, while documenting a candid look at Leimer’s work methods.

Leimer, K.

Spall

Palace Of Lights

Write. Record. Break. Recategorize. Reassemble. In K. Leimer’s most recent work, he returns to his long-running interest in developing relationships in sound that are not composed, not planned, not under conscious influence or control. Phrases and patterns emerge from dense layering and editing; melodic elements are split apart, re-voiced and reset in successive contexts. A music of distressed fragments, Spall originates from acoustic, electric, synthesized, manipulated, torn, and piece-work audio that combines into complex, layered, and flowing pieces of unexpected turns and contrasts. Modified, melted, and shaped into shifting sonic environments that fuse the clear signal with the distorted, the recognizable with ambiguous, Spall is music mined from an abandoned quarry.

Leimer, K.

LUYU

Palace Of Lights

“These things happen,” says K. Leimer of LUYU. Listen Until You Understand is a test drive through an obstacle course designed for new instruments, arrangements, juxtapositions, and real-time experiments dedicated to leaving the original impulses untouched and unadorned. Joined at times by digital percussionist Dolphie Stein, the music throws itself against itself without loyalty to genre or form, mashing granular particles into a tremulous spectrum of soundwalls, transitions, noise, distortions, and the occasional clearing. As close to live improvisation as one can get in a multitrack studio setting, LUYU takes generative techniques and drops them into short-form events by building its soundstage in thickets of shifting elements, collapsing phrases, broken signatures, and implied patterns. An outlier in Leimer’s catalog of general stillness and subtle detail, LUYU revels in the bare sound of things usually hidden in the mix. Kerry Leimer founded Palace Of Lights in 1979. Leimer’s work has also been issued by Abstrakce, Autumn, First Terrace, Les Giants, Invisible Inc., Origin Peoples and RVNG. His work is included in the Cherry Red Noise Floor compilation series and his early cassette work is featured in the critically acclaimed VOD box set American Cassette Culture. Leimer has been actively producing music since the mid 1970s—his current catalog includes twenty solo albums plus collaborative albums with Savant, Marc Barreca, and Three Point Circle. Recent soundtracks include work for video artists Cristiane Bouger and Fred Birchman, HBO’s How To With John Wilson and the Netflix documentary John Was Trying to Contact Aliens. His...

Leimer, K.

Music for Land and Water

Palace Of Lights

Marking its Fortieth anniversary, this definitive, release is newly remastered by James Savage and makes available all versions including the only live recording of "Art and Science". Due to the duration of these pieces Music for Land and Water is exclusively available in multiple digital formats. Since 1983 the three pieces that comprise Music for Land and Water have been available in a variety of formats and mixes: the original 1983 Palace of Lights cassette; a remastered version for the Autumn Records CD release; and finally the edited and remixed versions produced for the 2018 limited edition vinyl release on the Les Giants label. Originally developed for a gallery installation, MFLAW was assembled using four closed-loop, multi-track tape players, each playing back a different duration closed loop containing varied time and pitch compatible material. In addition to the installation, Art and Science was performed in Seattle's Seward Park. That performance, included here, shows the effects of winds on open tape loops, adding occasional flutter and distortion as the masters ran from one machine to the next. Seward Park proved an ideal setting for hearing the music, especially out on the trails and among the trees, away from the amphitheater, where the music approached silence.

Leimer, K.

Music for the Open Air

Palace Of Lights

K. Leimer has composed a companion suite of vertical, low-level music for active or passive listening by revisiting and updating the techniques he used for composing Music for Land and Water. An ambient genre exercise, Music for the Open Air is not satisfied to act as aural wallpaper. The tracks present the listener with an evolving set of discrete parts, interacting at different levels and times. Sound that is immersed in detail and depth –– shaped by an overall airiness and shaded by cycles of emerging and retreating subtleties. The pieces range in duration from 21 to 38 minutes, making them ideal for ambient use in public spaces, or random shuffling wherever sheer, organized sound is useful. While Open Air is an easy and comfortable fit for the broad ambient genre, the material doesn’t employ new age gloss and never descends to simpleminded prettiness. Within its clouds and folds the sound reveals rich veins of graininess, distortion, and dissonances that impart a gravity most ambient works lack.

Leimer, K.

The Starting Errors

Palace Of Lights

K. Leimer’s The Starting Errors serves as a handy index of catastrophes. The album documents the way in which the repetition of unexamined cultural behaviors spread as established—even acceptable—practice in the service of the few, no matter how damaging and destructive those practices prove. Music of conscience and consequence set within a general theme of things-gone-wrong, the album is built around a set of errors carefully indexed by the title track: a text-centric piece read by Tallula Bentley, exhibiting an ideological kinship with the work of Henry Cow, here set in an orchestral pastiche. Vocal works are rare for Leimer, but using spoken words in addition to instrumental voices was the most direct path to making his views explicit. Throughout the album techniques surface from jazz-inflected improvisation to classic tape manipulation to granular processing and chamber ensemble airiness. The results catalog most of Leimer’s long history of sonic preoccupations, embracing broken song structures, dark ambience, noise, calamitous repetition, and modular constructs. He describes it this way: “The goal was to use a wide range of approaches, techniques and voicing to best express the subject matter of each piece. And, despite the thematic unity, the pieces evolved in many directions.”

Leimer, K.

Mitteltöner72

Palace Of Lights

Mitteltöner72—K. Leimer’s homage to the German Kosmische period —is an expanded, remixed and newly mastered edition of the Origin Peoples LP released in 2018. ’72 includes all the music produced but not originally released for the LP.  “Leimer’s love of kosmische is evident from the start, as “Dunne Luft” condenses the earmarks of that sound into its four minutes. There’s the solar flares of guitar that arise early on in the track, fuzzy and luminous, serving less as a lead instrument and more as a sonic texture. It sounds like a sly homage to the arcing six-string stylings of Neu! and Harmonia member Michael Rother, but rather than simply pay tribute, Leimer lets pinging synths bustle underneath and processes and loops live drums to keep the track’s momentum going. The flickering rhythms bring to mind the blurry highways evoked on Autobahn while the ghostly melodies of the piece bear the evocative beauty of Popol Vuh. Rather than serve as mere pastiche, Mitteltöner encapsulates Leimer’s unique talents: drawing on a vintage sound now over forty years old and entering into middle age, while also finding a way to push it forward.” —Pitchfork

Leimer, K.

Found Objects

Palace Of Lights

Found object is a loan translation from the French objet trouvé, describing art created from undisguised, but often modified, objects or products that are not normally considered materials from which art is made, often because they already have a non-art function. Like the results from automatic writing and readymades, Found Objects offers an approximation of those techniques in sound by repurposing displaced phrases and timbres, pitches, restatements, and treatments as the root technique. K. Leimer describes it this way: “I worked toward a greater variety of outcomes between each of the pieces, with the goal of providing a more diverse listening experience. At the same time it became important to avoid any specific sense of adhering to a particular genre.” After eleven months in the studio, Found Objects finally became music, but only as the result of almost continuous, arbitrarily redirected accidents.

Leimer, K.

A Figure Of Loss

Palace Of Lights

A Figure Of Loss takes K. Leimer’s music into highly personal terrain.  Written and recorded during two dark years, the resulting work hovers in proximity of a calm and placid consistency, tenuously balanced on expanding and contracting foundations. Built mostly around modeled and treated piano and digital synthesis, a sense of coherence emerged from piece to piece during the recording and editing process, yielding a sustained, but disturbed elegiac atmosphere, seemingly content to meditate on its own specific set of limits. But A Figure Of Loss reaches from well-defined patterns to fragmented and shifting densities. This is a music of reflection, setting itself at a distance from loss in order to possibly comprehend it. The CD includes a portfolio of photographs by Tyler Boley and a download code for the entire album. It was mastered by James Savage.K. Leimer founded Palace Of Lights in 1979. Leimer’s work has also been issued by Autumn, First Terrace, Les Giants, Invisible Inc., Origin Peoples and RVNG. His early cassette work is included in the critically acclaimed VOD box set American Cassette Culture and is included in Cherry Red’s Noise Floor series. Leimer has been actively producing music since the mid 1970s—his current catalog includes eighteen solo albums plus collaborative albums with Savant and Marc Barreca. His work is included in the collection of The British Library.

Leimer, K.

Irrational Overcast

First Terrace Records

First Terrace Records have the honour to present an album of new work by influential and idiosyncratic artist K. Leimer. His second outing for First Terrace, following his part on FTS001, the album finds the composer working in a solemn & focused mode, rendering deep sonic landscapes that shimmer, sink into themselves and play host to a slowly emerging carousel of auditory apparitions - dynamics delivered through his mastery of textural manipulation. Emerging in opposition to the sunless days & countless distresses of current US politics, each track is imbued with a refreshing sense of equanimity - in Kerry’s own words, he “does not profess that music - especially an experimental, lyric-free music - can change or influence such circumstances. But this is the context in which we now live, and this has shaped the music of Irrational Overcast — a coping mechanism for living under clouds of baseless beliefs and simplistic ideologies that disfigure and stifle what is an admittedly difficult though really quite lovely world.”

Leimer, K.

Useless Epitomes

Palace Of Lights

Originally released in 2008, The Useless Lesson and Lesser Epitomes have been revisited, remixed, remastered and expanded with the 40-minute bonus EP Three Adaptations. K. Leimer founded Palace Of Lights in 1979. Leimer’s work has also been issued by Autumn, First Terrace, Les Giants, Invisible Inc., Origin Peoples and RVNG. His early cassette work is included in the critically acclaimed VOD box set American Cassette Culture and will be included in Cherry Red’s upcoming Noise Floor series. Leimer has been actively producing music since the mid 1970s—his current catalog includes eighteen solo albums plus collaborative albums with Savant and Marc Barreca. His work is included in the collection of The British Library.  “Lesser Epitomes provides three short suites of music all composed using a system of chance to give shape to basic musical elements. The listener is then advised to randonly re-order them, creating a vast number of permutations within the set... as brief episodes of grouped strings move past each other with the stately indifference of dancers in a ballroom.” —The Wire   “The opening pieces set the bar remarkably high: ‘To force closed our eyes’ introduces the album with mournful string patterns that recall Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3 (aka Symphony of Sorrowful Songs), and ‘Failing need of more,’ a fourteen-minute collaboration by Leimer and phonographer Anode, billows heavenly like a gargantuan, almost imperceptibly moving cloud mass. By album’s end, I’m none the wiser as to how Leimer produced The Useless Lesson but the largely glorious results...

Leimer, K.

Degraded Certainties

Palace Of Lights

“Degraded Certainties was generated via the layering of arbitrarily ordered tone clusters and by using signal reprocessing as the principal method by which to determine the music’s timbre and form. Such production details are interesting but convey little, however, of how beautiful the six soundscapes are that (K.) Leimer and company have created. In the opening “Angoisse,” an occasional harp pluck appears amidst enveloping swathes of digital sound, while vaporous shimmer and hazy synth tones and phased slivers and lilting string plucks dominate elsewhere. A connection to classical minimalism emerges during “Common Nocturne” when sparse droplets of acoustic piano playing appear alongside gentle synthetic swells. Strings and electronics swim leisurely in deep electroacoustic seas, and ethereal, elegiac, tranquil, peaceful, and placid are just some of the words that might spring to mind as you listen to the recording’s time-suspending settings.”  —Textura  K. Leimer founded Palace Of Lights in 1979. Leimer’s work has also been issued by Autumn, First Terrace, Les Giants, Origin Peoples, and RVNG as well as early work included in an upcoming Cherry Red retrospective of seminal U.S. electronica and the VOD box set American Cassette Culture. Leimer has been actively producing music since the mid 1970s—his current catalog includes 18 solo albums plus collaborative albums with Savant and Marc Barreca. His work is included in the collection of The British Library.

Leimer, K.

Threnody

Palace Of Lights

Threnody by K. Leimer is a music of disorientation, error and loss. Free of any particular sense of continuity or structure, Threnody dwells in an absent-minded and forgetful state, inhabiting an aftermath of events too disorienting to be completely comprehended. Highly atmospheric, the music draws from influences as diverse as Arve Henriksen, David Sylvian, Taylor Deupree and Biosphere. Shattered phrases emerge among shrouded details in a state of sustained incompleteness. In a departure for Leimer, this music is highly improvised, mostly studio-generated in real-time. “I approached the work by repeatedly abandoning it and, at some later time, after pursuing some other task, after days or weeks of new outrages, wandered back and tried to once more pick up the threads.” Threnody is music tuned to a fractured time.K. Leimer founded Palace of Lights in 1979. Leimer’s work has also been issued by Autumn, First Terrace, Les Giants, Origin Peoples and RVNG and his cassette work is included in the critically acclaimed VOD box set American Cassette Culture. Leimer has been actively producing music since the mid 1970s—his current catalog includes eighteen solo albums plus collaborative albums with Savant and Marc Barreca. His work is included in the collection of The British Library.

Leimer, K.

Imposed Order / Imposed Absence (Remastered + Expanded)

Palace Of Lights

The first phase of K. Leimer’s recorded work began in 1972 with the production of the Grey Cows cassette and culminated in 1983 with the release of Imposed Order. Though work seemingly stopped following the release of I/O, Leimer continued to record and experiment with sound during what proved to be a 15-year interegnum for his Palace of Lights label. That work, never before issued, is included in this expanded remaster. Imposed Absence features ten tracks recorded in the years between Imposed Order and his return to releasing music with The Listening Room.Imposed Absence features the addition of Mellotron and early digital synths, some excursions into lo-fi and, unusual in his catalog, a few improvised tracks. Combined with the VOD double album of his earliest tape recordings and RVNG’s A Period Of Review double album, the release of Imposed Order / Imposed Absence brings the entirety of Leimer’s early work into view. Remastered by Taylor Deupree at 12K Mastering, the vinyl includes a four-page booklet and download card for all nineteen tracks.K. Leimer founded Palace of Lights in 1979. Leimer has been actively producing music since the mid 1970s—his current catalog includes eighteen solo albums plus collaborative albums with Savant and Marc Barreca. His work is included in the collection of The British Library.

Leimer, K.

Land Of Look Behind

Palace Of Lights

BACK IN STOCK!!!  Received an 8.2 rating from Pitchfork.  Alan Greenberg, who wrote and directed this film documenting the funeral of Bob Marley, provided K. Leimer with location tapes which were used to originate many of the rhythmic patterns for Land of Look Behind. Originally released in 1982, this album was remastered and reissued on CD in 2013, and on LP in 2017. Loops of the monologues and phrases that exhibited more distinctive cadences and pacing, the words, glottal stops, clicks and coughs of witnesses were used as cues for the percussion instruments. In effect, speech became the organizing principle of the musical score. By eliminating the accuracy of click tracks, musicians were prompted to rove through the inconsistent intervals of the voice-derived patterns. Also included is a four-page insert featuring an essay by Paul Dickow. An excerpt:  “While acknowledging that the film and the album might have divergent paths, it's interesting to note what remains similar between them: the contemplation on mystery and the meditative nature of Rastafarian ritual. Both the album and film seek to honor deeply contemplative, musical traditions of the people who live at the frontier of Cockpit Country. If this album were made today, the sonic material of reggae itself might become the focus. But for both Greenberg and Leimer, it’s meditative practice itself that becomes the inspiration.”  – Paul Dickow   K. Leimer founded Palace of Lights in 1979. Leimer’s early work has recently been reissued by Autumn and RVNG, and...

Leimer, K.

Permissions

Palace Of Lights

2012 release. Permissions is somewhat of a collaboration with Taylor Deupree, given that the 12k head is credited with “additional voices, post-production, edit, mix, and mastering.” The detail isn’t insignificant, either, as Permissions largely collapses whatever stylistic differences might normally separate 12k and Palace of Lights recordings.   Arranged into concise song-like structures, the material exemplifies the concentration on fluttering micro-sound textures, electro-acoustic sounds, and field recordings that’s shared by the two creators and often captured on a typical 12k release. Listed sans titles on the CD cover as simply Permissions 01-16, the settings function like snapshots that cumulatively provide an in-depth portrait of Leimer’s range. The mood is generally laid-back, meditative, and explorative, but the elements drawn upon are not only pastoral in nature as industrial sounds surface, too.   Despite their brevity, the pieces are often striking, such as the fourteenth, which gracefully augments a series of percussion accents with a rising ambient wave, and the sixteenth, which finds minute guitar plucks resonating against a crackling mass. Permissions offers a compelling document of Leimer’s artistry.

Leimer, K.

The Grey Catalog

Palace Of Lights

2015 release. The Grey Catalog departs from Leimer’s typical obsessions with understatement and homogeneity to range freely across rhythmic, melodic and disassembled forms. Incorporating percussion, electric guitar and bass as well as found sound, digital and analog synthesis and sampled instruments, The Grey Catalog spins off multiple intimations of musical forms.   Compiled over a two-year period, as diverse as the pieces are, they are also related by a shared generative technique and a shared library of voices and processing. Track selection for the final 15 was made from more than 30 pieces, and curated with the input of Matthew Werth, Paul Dickow, Greg Davis and Ron Schepper. The result is an album of highly personal music, restless and shifting forms, with melodic passages drawn over sets of self- regulating sources and shaped by chance.   "A resplendent soundworld rich in keyboards, strings, guitar, bass, and electronics is presented throughout, and it quickly becomes apparent that describing Leimer’s material as ambient proves to be a bit of a misnomer. Yes, the tempo is typically slow and the music far from frenetic, but the amplitude of sounds within a given arrangement makes for an always arresting listening experience, and the sonorous flow in a representative piece such as “Sift” is masterfully executed. And as “Absent Quarter” and “Halts” illustrate, the sensibility that comes through the tracks feels as much Eastern as Western, given the material’s meditative bent and lulling rhythmic flow." – Textura

Leimer, K.

Re-enact

Palace Of Lights

Following a few years of back-catalog recovery, K. Leimer has completed work on his first new solo album since The Grey Catalog. These ten new tracks follow an emergent arc, a refinement of the techniques he has used since Permissions. Highly tactile, with an emphasis on subharmonics, Re-enact sketches an antediluvian soundstage of deteriorating fragments scattered among still-recognizeable artifacts. This multitude of points-of-collapse in textural, timbral, harmonic and rhythmic relationships, continually folds in on itself to reveal moments of inner coherence and cognition. Embedded throughout with a wealth of digital and analog detail, Re-enact sets a new post-ambient direction for Leimer’s work. K. Leimer founded Palace of Lights in 1979. Leimer’s early work has recently been reissued by Autumn and RVNG, and his early cassette work is in the critically acclaimed VOD box set American Cassette Culture. Leimer has been actively producing music since the mid 1970s – his current catalog includes 17 albums plus two collaborative albums with Marc Barreca. Leimer’s work is included in the collection of The British Library.

Leimer, K.

Closed System Potentials

Palace Of Lights

Following the RVNG reissues of A Period Of Review (ranked the #7 reissue of 2014 by The Wire) and Artificial Dance (ranked the #2 reissue of 2015 by The Wire), Closed System Potentials, recorded in 1979 and originally released in 1980, finds its way back to CD. In their review of A Period of Review, Pitchfork said, “These pieces most closely evoke the work of Roedelius and Moebius in Cluster: meditative, wistful, lovely, giving off gentle glimmers of light.In trying to think if the closest American corollary for this set, the possibility emerges that Kerry Leimer is one of the lone examples of American kosmische music, that elegant hybrid that falls somewhere between the Velvets-style mesmerism of Can in the early ’70s and the placid tones of new age music that arose in the next decade. It’s a sound that applies to mid-’70s Cluster, Ash Ra Tempel, Popul Vuh, the second side of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, and others.”K. Leimer founded the Palace of Lights label in 1979. Leimer’s early work was reissued by Autumn and RVNG in 2014 and 2015, and his early cassette work is in the critically acclaimed Vinyl On Demand box set American Cassette Culture. He has been actively producing music since the mid 1970s— his current catalog includes 16 still-in-print albums plus two collaborative albums with Marc Barreca.Leimer’s work is included in the collection of The British Library.