Dug Derek’s recent disc on Kendra Steiner Editions and this one makes a nice companion piece. Rogers is an electronic composer based in Austin Texas and Triagonals is a beautiful, miasmic setting for organic electronics with low bass tones illuminated by sidereal melodies, high constellations of chattering drone and slow, almost raga-esque waveforms. 

Fantastic setting for Bill Shute’s poetry by Derek Rogers with fragments of speech floating up though ethereal/doomy organ drones and tone in a way that somehow reminds me of Lothar & The Hand People’s classic “Space Hymn” (!!??)... Four Texas Streams remains one of the most evocative Shute’s early works and to hear it this dilated is just fantastic. Hand-numbered edition of 55 copies. 

Hand-numbered edition of 89 copies w/a live set from the duo of synth/electronic composer Derek Rogers and synth/bassist R. Lee Dockery, an excerpt from an installation performance in Austin, the atmosphere of which Bill Shute perfectly captures in his write-up: “The hypnotic “Five Toned Rows,” both cavernous and shimmering, is an excerpt from a two-hour performance by Matamoros that was part of the “Rehearsal at the Astoria” installation by UK artist Graham Hudson, which ran for two months at Austin’s Arthouse and incorporated live musicians creating sounds that were “not formal concerts or performances” but “music with the wires hanging out, fragile and with chance, more open.”  It was a Friday evening in Austin, around the end of the workday, with thousands of sealed, air-conditioned SUV’s containing men and women in business attire driving down Congress Avenue past the Arthouse, headed for dinner in the suburbs and Austin’s many bedroom communities, oblivious to the goings-on in that building on the northwest corner of 7th and Congress that they’d never entered before or even thought about. But inside, among the scaffolding and the fragments meant to evoke London’s now-demolished Astoria Theatre, described by the artist as “ghost-like,” DEREK ROGERS and R. LEE DOCKERY (together, as the duo MATAMOROS) were creating the haunting music found on FIVE TONED ROWS. Beginning with keyboards suggesting some sinister sideshow from Purgatory, the music begins to unfold and deepen, with percussion, distant wordless vocals, electronics and sampled sound, and bowed upright bass, capturing the mystery and the muted grandeur of the long-gone Astoria. This is a cdr that creates an atmosphere, an environment wherever you play it—-it begins in medias res and trails off as uneventfully as a squatter slipping out a side door when the sun comes up and the first employees arrive. And you must hit the “repeat” button and play it again. MATAMOROS played a handful of live shows in Austin before Derek Rogers relocated to Los Angeles at the end of June, and this live recording is a valuable document of the duo (studio recordings also exist and will no doubt continue to be made long-distance) that will be missed on the Austin experimental music scene. This is Derek’s third release for KSE, his two earlier works long out of print. R. Lee Dockery is a bassist and electronic musician who has gotten a lot of attention for his standout performances at the Floating Drones festival and the Lyr*I*Cism festival in Austin, and he’ll be doing a solo set at the KSE Anniversary Concert on July 31st. His set at Lyr*I*Cism will be issued this fall as a KSE 3″ cdr. As always with KSE 3″ cdr releases, while there is only 19 minutes of music on a disc so small you can slip it in your shirt-pocket, it’s meant to be a complete and satisfying trip. These are pieces not meant to run an hour, but to present such an intriguing and rich sound environment that 19 minutes is more than satisfying, and we hope also endlessly fascinating.” – Bill Shute. One of our favourite KSE releases to date.