assemblage by Ryan Hooper

assemblage is interested in the passing of time and reflects on small moments of connection between people and interior and exterior landscapes.

Conversations occur between site-specific performance, improvisation, recording and montage.

'poem for seasons and cycles' began with a poem after researching the life and artworks of Cy Twombly. These words were transferred to text to speech and played back as different domestic objects, radio samples and voice memos were layered.

'a thousand plateaus' was recorded in my house on 28 October 2022 using a tabletop electric guitar manipulated with various household objects, tapes, radio and laptop.

‘nothing is ever behind us’ is a fluid composite of scraps and off-cuts, domestic diary fragments, snippets of voice memos and other home recordings across the past decade.

'moredr preder' (melancholy anxiety in Cornish) is an edited suite of personal field recordings, found sounds, samples and improvised audio manipulations.

'the things we've seen' mixes collected orchestra drones with archive VHS recordings.

'field songs' is a symbolic search for Walden's woods.

assemblage: looking and listening, recording and extracting, a beauty found in low debris, of family and play, cats, companionship, the seasons, conversations, diary extracts, letters, calling home, treasured accidents, memorial devices, clutter, objects, bedroom jams, wind song, family trees, actual trees, walking in the woods, Walden, daydreaming, the sea, beachcombing, galleries and window frames, pictures and pavements, birds and laughter, cycles and endings, amateur recitals, of Plath, of Orpheus, Agustín Fernández Mallo, lost in hypertext, in myth, Barthes, folding/unfolding, collage, Rauschenberg, Twombly, texture and surface, fragments and erasures, pentimento, source and distance, the abstract, details, underpainting, melancholy, memos, answerphones, microphones, writing without words, asemic, gestures, performance, distortion, GUO/Blumberg, Basquiat, Bolaño, Borges, anxiety, sculpture, Hepworth, Guattari/Deleuze, connections, different spaces, lines of flight, landscapes, Lambkin, Lockwood, Jeck, rousay, improv, one take, AMM, Keith Rowe, French New Wave, montage, autobiographies, routines, the radio dial, feedback, VHS tape recorders, adverts and idents, haptics, sounds of daily life, of dreams, above, below, open and closed, in Cornwall, on roads, of times, from roots, carried across clouds

Originally released on CD by Wormhole World on 8 August 2023: https://wormholeworld.bandcamp.com/album/assemblage

Thank you very much to Paul and Wormhole World for all the support and welcoming me back to the label.

Tracklist

1.	poem for seasons and cycles	10:30

2.	a thousand plateaus	10:08

3.	nothing is every behind us	10:18

4.	moredh preder	10:03

5.	the things we've seen	10:06

6.	field songs	10:20

Credits

released September 8, 2023

assemblage | 6 tracks | 62 mins

Collated, edited and mixed during autumn/winter 2022 in Cornwall, England.

Dedicated to J.

Music and artwork by Ryan Hooper.

License