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Fearful Winter, Fearful Autumn

  Tobias

Even though most people are still referring to Dirk Serries' "Fear Falls Burning" as a side effort to his vidna obmana-alter ego, the project is slowly but surely closing the gap. Serries has toured restlessly and woven a fine net of friends and like-minded musicians with mutual respect for each other, which is now leading to a string of releases that should make the end of this and the beginning of next year a sheer delight for fans of experimental guitar music, frozen feedback, ripped reverb and drony ambient.

Quite a lot of these have a close connection to live performances, which makes sense as the project was born with the stage in mind. During the shows, it's just one man and his guitar, a few effect pedals and a looping device, which allows for several layers of tones and chords to overlap and form new structures. There's a shamanic quality to these musical rituals as well as an instinctive one - the length of the pieces is determined not only by the current moment but by all those that came before, rendering each performance an exciting "work in progress" and a journey for the instrumentalist as well as the audience.

Now, a double 7'' release on "Die Stadt" captures Serries in full flight in an all-star ensemble of related and contrasting acts. The release present one track per side for each of the artists, ranging from Z'EV's "Elementonal", which harks back to Berlin's "Atonal Festival" in the year 1983, John Duncan's ingenously titled "OFFFFFFFF" (this man's definitely not "on") and to more extended cuts by Aidan Baker ("Drone Four") and Fear Falls Burning ("The beautiful decline"). As always on "Die Stadt" you can expect the highest quality and an incredible amount of love and dedication in the artwork of this limited to 600 copies-publication and the discs come in a full-colour fold out cover. In addition, the first 300 editions will be accompanied by a double CD-set featuring remixes of the mentioned pieces by the respective artists. This will mean, for example, that Dirk stretches the original ten minutes of Baker's piece to an over half-hour long monster and the latter splits Serries' cut into to two lengthy compositions. Be quick, this one is hardly going to rest on the shelves for too long.

Talking about limited editions: Fine, but ... er ... small Italian label "Small Voices" will present "We slowly lift ourselvs from dust" (another happily titled track) somewhere in 2006. Expect another 28 wonderful minutes on a 10'' vinyl picture disc. Until this one hits the stores, there is also "The Carnival of Ourselves" on "C", the vinyl-imprint of the Dutch Tonefloat-label, which promises two tracks on vinyl (one on each side) in a run of 300 copies. And then, of course, there is still the big project of documenting Fear Falls Burning's live presence in Germany (May and October of 2005) with a series of releases on the excellent soleilmoon-label.

Can you keep up? Don't worry, if you don't feel like participating in the rush for these select treasures, you can still start your journey with the regular debut "He spoke in dead tongues", which we will feature in just a few days from now or with the Tour-CD "First by a Whisper, then by a Storm", which is slightly shorter, but a just as representative album. The way things are going, people will soon refer to "Vidna Obmana" as Dirk Serries' side project.

Homepage: Fear Falls Burning
Homepage: Vidna Obmana
Homepage: Fear Falls Burning on "Die Stadt"
Homepage: Fear Falls Burning on "Small Voices"
Homepage: Fear Falls Burning on Tonefloat/"C"