Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Purchasable with gift card
Download available in 16-bit/44.1kHz.
$6.66USD or more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Assembled by hand, one copy at a time, in the White Pillar Workshop! A white 5" compact disc-recordable, duplicated and printed via an Imation D20, held inside a white paperboard jacket with a 3x3" circular photographic sticker on the front cover and a white text label on the back cover. Includes the full 41:33 digital release plus a bonus sixth track "Vitreous Post" as a CD-R exclusive.
NOTE: Image is a mockup, stickers are still being printed. Estimated ship date is 6/12.
Includes unlimited streaming of Blue Air
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Buchla 200 system drums/chords
GForce SEM synthesizer
Sytrus 6-operator FM synthesizer
Boss DR-660 drum machine
Dnipro Dot trigger sequencer
Cute Labs Missed Opportunities trigger divider
Originally recorded June 2023
Casio MT-210 synthesizer
Arturia Microbrute synthesizer
Korg KPR-77 drum machine
Yamaha RX-11 drum machine
Boss DR-110 drum machine
Sytrus 6-operator FM synthesizer
GForce SEM synthesizer
Korg Poly 800 synthesizer
Waldorf PPG Wave 3.V synthesizer
Akai S2800 sampler
Originally recorded Spring 2023 during sessions for Ocean Lion IV
about
"Blue Air" is a single for/from the forthcoming Coppice Halifax album Mountain Interval, containing one LP track and four outtakes/alternative mixes as b-sides, all of which were excised from Mountain Interval for runtime limitations only. In this way, the "Blue Air" single isn't really a single at all, so much as a sibling to the main album being utilized in a more surface-level promotional capacity.
The music offered here happened, for the most part, incidentally. All of it, save for two tracks, stemming from a single illuminating session with my third variant of the invaluable Ornament and Crime multipurpose module in my Audioholistics modular system. This third version of Ornament differs from the first two I possess, bearing a much more powerful processor that transforms the machine from more of a voltage and clock utility into a four-channel synthesizer/drum machine/effects processing workstation, sort of like half of my beloved Yamaha QY-70, in Eurorack format. From nothing more than preliminary testing of this machine came an entirely unexpected album of work, and although I should not be surprised when this happens, twenty years into my creative process, it nonetheless always comes on like a strange lucid moment, as if I was away from my body while the work happened, and returned just in time to hear it emanating from my speakers.
Once the core idea of the album was in hand, it only needed to be finished by way of careful editing and augmentation. Overdub and arrangement sessions followed, using a wealth of virtual and physical machines that each occupy a distinct space in my studio, making the music you hear something that could only exist in the here and now of Coppice Halifax. This stands in contrast to the recent Shades of Night in Green Minor album, which mostly existed several years in the past before being brought to the surface. "Blue Air" and Mountain Interval are instead the shape of Coppice Halifax music today.
To be sure, many of my dearest influences from the world of rhythmic and psychedelic electronic music loom large over these pieces - Rod Modell, Stephen Hitchell, Stefan Betke, Wolfgang Voigt, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Thomas Brinkmann, Terre Thaemlitz, Erik Kowalski, Olaf Dettinger, Richard D. James, just to name a handful who all cast shadows over the way my music comes to life. Without their stellar contributions to the public consciousness, I don't really think this music would exist. Further, my friend, mentor and all-around guru David Burraston deserves individual thanking here, as it has been at his encouragement alone that I have delved into so many of these specific machines and their processes.
It is my sincere hope that "Blue Air" and the subsequent Mountain Interval album satisfy those who feel that Coppice Halifax has remained a bit more withdrawn over the last two years. I myself have felt that way about it, unsure of how or why it happened. I've just chalked it up to Milieu's extensive work with procedural ambient forms and the absolutely exhaustive gauntlet of making Watch the Head, but as always, it could simply be that Coppice Halifax music needed to disappear only so it could return, as Wolfgang Voigt once wisely stated.
credits
released June 7, 2024
W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded at White Pillar, 2023 (#2 and #5) and 2024. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Text by Brian. Photograph taken by Brian with a Holga CFN120 on 35mm film at Rolling Knoll, Columbia SC, 2008. This is Milieu Music number ABX132. (C) + (P) Oscillog ASCAP 2024. All nights preserved.
A spacious 2.5 hour soundtrack for Eufloria, an ambient strategy game currently available on Steam, Nintendo Switch and the Playstation Network. Coppice Halifax
A triple-album "beginner's guide" with 50 tracks selected from the first 10 years of Milieu releases. As apt a starting point as you're likely to find. Coppice Halifax
If I had to introduce someone to Milieu with a single album, it would be this one. This was the first one I have heard after discovering Milieu through the beautifully crystalline and blissfully out-there Eufloria soundtrack. It opened to me not only the mesmerizing musical universe that Brian is weaving, but the whole world of ambient electronic music in general. Milieu is criminally underrated. icetonic