Andrew Coleman
Date Released: 2001
Label: Thrill Jockey
Format: LP and CD album
Track Listing:
- Too Early By Far
- Pi Four
- Escalator Apartment
- Plot Lost Sixteen
- Pi Two
- My Trouble With Purple
- Leaving The Building
- Vocational Shouter
- Hang Up Season
- Ballet In A Safety Net
- Wider Ignorance
- Opulent Installation
- Curse Of Knowing
Check out the official album website from 2001
Introduction:
When I first started making music I had no particular direction. I knew I wanted to create something which reflected my interests in an eclectic range of music, but didn’t want to make a pastiche of any one genre. I love jazz, but making jazz with samples and computers seems pointless when it is such a spontaneous live form.
Over the course of my first two albums I found a sound and a direction for my music. When I started out creating and compiling music for Everything Was Beautiful And Nothing Hurt I intended the sound to be a tangent from the Animals On Wheels material. Infact, it has turned out to be more of a conclusion of what the other two albums contained.
It often feels like a lot of electronic music is about novelty. The novelty of ‘new’ sounds and the novelty of sequencer techniques. Subtlety and beauty have often been unfashionable and excluded. So I have worked towards finding a quiet music free from parts which scream ‘look at me, I’m different!’ and geared towards an organic and subtle whole.
Working towards a quiet, understated sound led me to break many digital production ‘rules’ I had picked up since starting out. I would turn down nearly every part somewhat, and mute or obscure any obvious novelty. This, along with the use of a rather old and noisy soundcard caused some of the material on Nuvol I Cadira to have a slightly aliased sound (an averaging which occurs through the limitations of 44khz/16bit recording) with plenty of background noise coming through the mix.
Contradiction has always been an important idea for me. The wild beats of my first releases were there to contradict the melodies. When I dropped them in favour of a quieter, more cohesive sound I found contradiction by looking for beauty within rough, lo-fi sounds and a rather noisy production style. A punk beauty maybe?
Everything Was Beautiful And Nothing Hurt takes this lo-fi approach a step further with more layers of noise (cheap soundcards are great for this!) and more amplified quiet parts. Adding ambient recordings of sounds I hear around me, along with the background noise introduced in the process, adds yet another layer of atmosphere.
Andrew Coleman, 2001