***With Standing Still, Facing Forward ENSEMBLE ECONOMIQUE provides the most mature realization of BRIAN PYLE’s compositional process, which utilizes found sounds, field recordings, and musical performance that he later meticulously edits, layers, and loops in the studio. The effects of these processes are dramatic, cinematic and conceptually rigorous and this recording evidences Pyle as an important new composer emerging out of the long and storied tradition of West Coast experimentalism. Utilizing a delicate combination of the homespun improvisation of his other project, STARVING WEIRDOS (whose work sounds like an American echo of AMM) with his own unique variation on the European avant-garde in Ensemble Economique, Pyle’s practice involves a dense approach to composition akin to assemblage. But unlike electronic and laptop composition, Pyle’s studio work aims to re-establish an organism associated with live (or, in the case of the field recordings, lived) performance that pushes the studio out into nature and nature into the studio. In short, the Northern Californian landscape plays an integral part in Ensemble Economique’s soundscapes, and this record captures much of the atmosphere of Pyle’s home terrain.