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Fifty years after I first encountered the music of Orchid Spangiafora, it is a pleasure to be

listening to new work by this most bonny of modern sound manipulators.

Like Flee Pasts Ape Elf (FTR 096), which we reissued in expanded form in 2013, Eel Asp Flaps

Feet (the title of which is an anagram of the earlier set) is an assemblage of immaculate invention. It manages to produce a unique splotch of confusing analog surrealism in an increasingly digital world, and Robert Carey (aka Orchid himself) deigned to provide these notes on creating the music:

“This album is a combination of some new material and ideas and some older stuff that had not found its way into a tangible (non-online) form.

“ ‘Syllabus,’ ‘Dyad’ and ‘Retroscope’ were an attempt to return to an older style of electronic music. I put these on bandcamp, but they did not attract much attention.

“In mid 2021 David Greenberger provided me with the voice recordings he had made for the Everybody’s Home project he did with Tyson Rogers. He asked if there was something I could do with them. I put together ‘Holding Pattern’ and ‘In A Fog.’ These two pieces might be considered the ‘dub version’ of Everybody’s Home. I put them on bandcamp as Nobody’s Home.

“The rest were originally made up of typical Orchid snippets. When I first took an electronic music course in 1972 one of the things that struck me about tape loops was how readily they produced interesting rhythms. Since then I got more into selecting them for the rhythm, but rather than repeating I tried to convey it in a single shot followed by slightly modified versions. In a number of these pieces I tried returning to actually repeating phrases enough to hear the natural rhythm of each loop.

“The mechanical sounds combined with vocal loops in, for example, ‘Interlude One,’ probably were influenced by the collaboration with Seymour Glass on Cous Cous Bizarre (FTR 594). The rapid streams of syllables in the ‘Ur Sonata’ came from playing around with an audio batch processing program. I used it to cut up regular loops into very short bits and string them together. Then, as with most electronic or ‘tape’ music, the real work consisted of removing the parts that didn’t belong. The title comes from Kurt Schwitters because I felt the piece shared some of the same motivation or aesthetic, although the implementation is not at all alike.”

Well, those are the component parts, but to truly grasp the whole, you must hold your brain tight & jump right in. There is just nothing like an Orchid Spangiafora album. Tell your friends.

–Byron Coley, 2024

Orchid Spangiafora

Releases

Eel Asp Flaps Feet

Flee Past’s Ape Elf