The 9th of 16 tracks commissioned by Constellation for the Corona Borealis Longplay Singles series 2020-2021. "The Smell of Wet Clay" soundtrack single is PWYC exclusive to Bandcamp and a free bonus track for immediate download with preorders of The Proposal.
Corona Borealis singles are released every Thursday in Oct-Nov 2020 and Jan-Feb 2021.
Each Corona Borealis single has a video:
vimeo.com/489520554
More info about the Corona Borealis series
cstrecords.com/coronaborealis/
Check cstrecords for special offers & LP/CD bundles that can't be set up via Bandcamp (especially if you're interested in buying multiple physical records from the label's catalogue and/or you're shipping to a destination outside North America).
cstrecords.com/catalogue
from
The Proposal,
released June 11, 2021
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
ARTIST STATEMENT:
“The Smell of Wet Clay” is a collaboration with the conceptual artist, writer and filmmaker Jill Magid, and film editor Hannah Buck that stems from our work together on Jill’s 2018 film The Proposal. Constellation will be releasing the soundtrack album for The Proposal this summer.
An extraordinary hybrid documentary, The Proposal follows Jill’s deep and sly artistic engagement with the work of architect Luis Barragán. I’ll let that film speak for itself when you seek it out (please do) but for now the important thing to know is that The Proposal is, in its way, a thriller, and a thriller has no time to pause.
So, when the idea of making "The Smell of Wet Clay" for this Longplay series surfaced this summer, in the middle of a pandemic which has put everything on pause, it offered the chance to revisit a collaborative connection that was built in proximity and under pressure, this time at a distance, but with a new spirit of contemplation.
The music itself was made in a tiny cabin I had rented on the Massachusetts coast this August while exiled from my Brooklyn studio due to a virus-cursed construction project. I couldn’t invite musicians to join me physically, but I had the original recording sessions for The Proposal, which were a loose and collaborative affair, to build from.
Among those recordings were some spare, humid basic tracks I had made with Jim White on Drums, Jason Ajemian on Bass and Matana Roberts on saxophone that resonated both with the lovely footage that Jill and Hannah were sending me, and also with the weird state of solitude and dislocation that the Coronavirus has birthed. In deconstructing those tracks and rebuilding them to create the music for this project, I layered a choir of bowed banjo, electronics, field recordings and guitar over Jim, Jason and Matana, and in the process got to bring some collaborators that I love into that small cabin with me. – T. Griffin
CREDITS:
Music by T. Griffin
Jason Ajemian: Bass
Matana Roberts: Alto Saxophone
Jim White: Drums
T. Griffin: Banjo, Mexico City Field Recordings, Guitar, Synthesizers
Video:
Directed by Jill Magid
Edited by Hannah Buck
Cinematography by Jarred Alterman