assemblage by ex-corp
Compact Disc released July 2025
Digital Files below
The exquisite corpse game – invented by the Surrealists in the early 20th century – is one that requires a rare combination of imagination and communal trust. One must uphold the rules first, and place their personal contribution second to those rules. The game, the rules, the act of playing becomes more precious than what is created. In this case, the rules have led to a thing being built, an assemblage, and here, with this impossible sculpture of recorded sound, we are left to play while the wind moves the light.
A group of collaborators – Ben Felton, Daniel Klag, Bill Gillim, John Crouch, Mike Walters, Dan Goldberg – used this exquisite corpse approach, this game, these rules, to create Assemblage. Many of these players have worked across many labels (including pre-Cached Patient Sounds), under many monikers, and have a massive collective discography. Here, they present their first exercise as Ex Corp. Two sprawling tracks made by following a prompt laid out by Felton: he sends a track to someone, they record responding to what he sent, he sends the responders track to someone, they respond, repeat. So, each artist only has the previous contributors’ reaction to a buzzing and hidden network of playing and thinking at any given moment. A kind of psychic musical game of telephone. In the end, all contributions are overlaid to create each of these two movements.
Evoking a kind of 2008 experimental nostalgia, these two experiments feel like a group of friends in a basement with low ceilings zoning out amongst piles of gear. Both close and also distant. Think Caboladies, early Emeralds, WZT Hearts, Sunburned Hand of the Man. A distinctly psychedelic kind of music-as-adventure born from the collisions of noise, new age, post rock, spiritual jazz and “free music.” Equal parts shambolic and beatific. Synths and drones, hissing electronics, jangling sonorous guitars, quasi-tribal jazz percussion and drums flutter together in curious twists. Much like many exquisite corpse drawings, things become disjointed or confused in places, and that confusion feels more like the rules of the game working to create tension and release. In some ways we listen with questions. These players are expressing a kind of technological and aesthetic empathetic response, and that empathy will suddenly emerge in dazzling moments, flutters of melody, strange and tangled turns, and satisfying slow arcs of push and pull sound and music.
Recorded from September 2022 to April 2023
Ben Felton - Guitar
Daniel Klag - Samples, guitar
Bill Gillim - Wind controller
John Crouch - Drums
Mike Walters - Synthesizer,Piano
Dan Goldberg - Synthesizer on track 1
Photography by Daniel Klag
Layout and design by Matthew Sage for Cached.Media
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