billy steiger: loud object

Loud Object is the first solo LP from artist Billy Steiger. Both a visual artist and a musician, Steiger's debut plays as a two-sided experiment in markmarking and sound, as a kind of writing by ear -- metallic, brushed, wooden -- lines imprinted and pressed circular. The record takes its name from the discarded title of the several-hundred-page draft of Clarice Lispector's eventual 96-page novel Água Viva (1973). Devoid of characters or plot, Água Viva appears always in suspension between the interior and exterior and impression and expression. Weird and formless (like the jellyfish "agua viva" translates to in Portuguese) Lispector's text deals less in the cerebral or the knowable realms of words, but more in the unknowable moment of experience. Its joy is found in its looseness, its meaning found in its lack of definition. Loud Object began as six sides of violin improvisations, four of them abandoned and the last of them added to or processed usings samplers in moments Steiger calls "wells" -- gaps or dips in the recording which could be filled or poured into. The process of filling up and taking away, of repeating and multiplying, of building tension between the finite and the lost -- all wrestle with actualization. Which line will be drawn? In the liner notes for the LP, Evie Scarlett Ward writes, "The record holds loss." Though the lines are fixed, its contents are fluid - forty minutes filled in and manipulated, before time moves on. Steiger's relentless rearranging of convention means no two of his live shows are the same, and his decade-plus involvement in London's free improvisation scene constantly surprises. Loud Object is no exception. Recorded on February 12-14 2021 by Daniel Blumberg. Produced by Billy Steiger. Mixed by Billy Steiger and Shaun Crook. Mastered by Guiseppe Ielesi. Artwork by Billy Steiger. Layout by Oli Barrett. Liner notes by Evie Scarlett Ward.