"No matter what Hall’s music evokes for individual listeners though, it is deeply involving on a very personal level..."
"Much like the photographs that accompany this release, the music evokes the transitions from day to night in places where nature and the constructed environment intersect..."
René Schaefer - Mess + Noise
www.messandnoise.com/releases/2000626
released digitally on
OVERLAP.ORG (San Francisco)
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It has been in excess of 2 years since Tom Hall's last full length solo release. Since that release Hall has crossed the globe a number times playing in excess of 250 live shows, experimenting and honing many of his techniques for producing live sound and image performances. However, during this time Hall has been working away on one record, 'Past Present, Below', whether it's been sitting on planes 35,000 feet above the earth or hidden away in a warehouse in San Francisco, this album is the 'record' of 2 years of experimentation, honing and life experiences drawn from almost every area Hall has visited, played, tasted or experienced.
Past Present, Below, marks the refinement and accumulation of a set of studio practices Hall was fighting to become comfortable with some 2 years ago. Utilising a variety of techniques to bring together a vast array of instrumentation that includes drums, guitar, piano, organ, virbraphone, chinese gongs and harmonia in combination with field recordings stemming from vast regions as foreign as the most south western tip of Australia to Kyoto temples, German rivers and Tasmanian forests. Hall ties these varied sources together with a unique blend of studio practices ranging from max/msp processing to guitar fx pedals and organic processing which sees Hall replaying/recording pre-constructed compositions back in to environments where they originated. His use of software often involves using parameters or organic field recordings for the basis of any synthesis, with the direction or manipulation often controlled by aspects of the area from which the recordings were derived.
It is Hall's passion for the 'mundane' and the 'everyday' that inspires him to work with sound as a means to both document his surrounds but also as a way to create larger representations of the vast regions he has covered in the past years. These larger environments become what he likes to describe as 'hybrid environments', places and spaces that meet sonically and musically in Hall's compositions but could never in 'real-life' collide.
This album due to it's accumulative nature and time spent bringing it together is Hall's most developed work to date.