Premiere: Kramer Shares New Video/Single “Burial At Sea”

As shown via this new track’s accompanying visual, Dutch Visual Artist TINCA VEERMAN takes Kramer’s idiosyncratic ambient works to new depths of awareness in this liquid lament, composed for the legions lost at sea, and for those who travelled beside them, yet survived, doomed to forever wonder why.

Speaking on his forthcoming LP of ambient, atmospheric works, Kramer wrote: “What i have come to embrace is the working notion that there is no Past, and no Future. There is only a constantly evolving series of microscopic moments that constitute the miraculous Present. As fertile as it is and always has been, for me, Memory is a chimera. So if you asked me what it is exactly that i am trying to do now, with Music, be it through song, or through ambience, i would confess that what i’m doing couldn’t be more simple; i am just trying to explain myself. I’m trying to show you who i am.”       

In the ten compositions that comprise this new LP, mournful at times yet mysteriously life-affirming and generous in their scope, Kramer sees films where there are none, and composes his accompanying ambient soundtracks in a state of interrupted grace. Words, text, complete screenplays, character arcs, shooting scripts and storyboards swirl through his head as he puts his imagery to sound, and the results evoke a world in which moths, drawn to the bright flickering lights of Cinema and the low humming lights of Dreams, in Kramer’s own words, “…might never die.” 

Though often evocative of dreams, there is nothing even remotely somnambulant about this new work. It bears witness to a frenetic intelligence that asks for the listener’s full and waking participation. Intensely passive yet electrically charged, the music comes before the film, as the film becomes the music.

The LP’s nature reveals an interior dialogue between musician and choice. Each piece represents Kramer’s encounter with the blank canvas of silence that greets him as a composer. Embracing sounds as objects and instruments of Truth, the end result of his process is as much about what is absent and what has been removed or edited away than what is left in its wake as artifacts of emotion. These pieces are the Spring frost of lost imaginings, vanitas to broken connections, visions nearly unrecordable by the human eye. Kramer envisions a music that functions to stop time, as an event that always plays in the present and never needs a past to give it a reference point. It is music that communicates in the most intimate way possible, as intricately and as deeply as the way it blossoms and shifts and evades categorization when exposed to thin air. 

Drawn toward the light of a multitude of influences, we hear echoes of the feverishly frozen dreams of composers Morton Feldman, Terry Riley, Brian Eno and Arvo Part, melting alongside the surreal cinemas of David Lynch and The Brothers Quay, all parts converging to evoke a time and place that does not exist outside of the mind’s eye of the listener. These ten works are fluid adventures in fathomless landscapes, emotions distilled and offered as a painter-less canvas without a physical home. Each individual composition is an offering to a future memory, a chalice to be filled with the listener’s own reactions to them. As a whole, the ten pieces form an image of ten circling planets in an expanding galaxy that colors itself anew with each subsequent listen. Movement, grace, and Peace. 

After making much of his career within the practically anonymous labors of an independent record producer — one that embroiders the labors of others to be seen in their finest light, without shedding originality for a brand or to be enhanced with jarring, trend-setting effects recycled for commerce and profits — Kramer’s collaborations strive to give a purer vision to Art and a confidence in wandering without boundaries through each artist’s ever-evolving intuitive processes. He regards the undiscovered oceans of creative possibilities without judgements or fears. For him, the act of making Art is the act of fearing nothing.

Composing these works for films that do not exist, Kramer collaborates on the video art for this project with Dutch Multi-Media artist Tinca Veerman, who crafts a uniquely idiosyncratic and profoundly sensual visual world for Kramer’s visceral imagination. Veerman’s stunning creations for the human eye are a perfect compliment for Kramer’s audio love letters for the human soul.

As a solo artist, Kramer has always worked with his own unique vocabulary. He is a sound-poet; a restless interpreter of his own imagination and emotions using the experience of his works to invite stillness, openness, Truth, and a selfless surrender to the infinite possibilities that manifest themselves by the simple yet sometimes radical act of Listening.  

Kramer’s work in music covers a vast spectrum of sound, unified only by an unwavering commitment to experimentation and collaboration. Even a straight telling of his bio reads like a wild tall tale. Producer of artists as varied as Will Oldham, Urge Overkill, Daniel Johnston, King Missile, Gwar, Galaxie 500, Half Japanese, White Zombie, Boredoms, and LOW, no single figure in American Indie music has a body of work that matches his. His NYC-based Shimmy-Disc label has provided a home to dozens of genre-free artists since 1987. 

A legendary indie audio artist blurring his lifelong attachments, from spontaneous composition (in the late 70’s with John Zorn) to experimental rock (with Bongwater and other bands in the 80’s) alongside his recent inquiries into the intricacies of ambient-folk songcraft (with his most recent solo LP, And The Wind Blew It All Away), Kramer continues to explore the possibilities of shaping naturally occurring aural landscapes into intoxicatingly affecting music. Sound and language – not just melody and ambient textures – has been his raw material for decades. He now juggles them more deftly than ever on his newest ambient opus, MUSIC FOR FILMS EDITED BY MOTHS.       

As one of our most alluring and enduring composer-producers, Kramer’s solo work has never been so mournful, nor so life-affirming, as he expresses it here, and now.

Source: thoughtswordsaction.com