Anti-Ark, by Sagan

Anti-Ark

by Sagan

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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
This Sagan consists of: Blevin Blectum, Jay Lesser and Wobbly —three solo artists from the San Francisco Bay Area’s legendarily weird electronic music scene, coming together in shared love of Space. Fifteen years in the making, their second album Anti-Ark arrives—a recursive love letter to the early decades of space travel and the High Frontier, when the lines between hard scientific research and emotional wanderlust melted away to reveal an optimistic vision for mankind’s shared future. Explosively kinetic, searingly romantic, the album draws on the trio’s formative influences: the electronic space music which Carl Sagan’s 1980 TV program Cosmos brought to a global audience. Sagan channels the Cosmos sound universe into new compositions, performed live and then folded in on themselves through countless edits into a molecular quilt. The album’s micro-bursts of ambient, meditative and kosmiche are woven into new and denser signals— flying by as if picked up by some satellite hurtling through every civilized universe, moving faster than known physics allows. Any given ten second stretch of Anti-Ark contains a greater density of sound design than might be typically deployed over the course of entire tracks—an attempted inventory not of the objects within the ecosystem, but of the relationships between them. Set against today’s closing windows of opportunity, each sound here contains its own melody and serves as a note within a larger one, a stream of that information which needs to be sung before it can be known.

www.detritus.net/wobbly/saganantiarkinterview.html

"...the Bread-and-Butterfly has wings of bread and butter and a head made of a lump of sugar. Alice says, 'What does it live on?' The answer is, 'Weak tea with cream in it.' At this point she begins to perceive a difficulty: its head will dissolve in its food. So she says, 'What happens if it can't get any?' And the Gnat, who's acting as guide, says, 'It dies.' Alice says, 'That must happen rather often.' The Gnat says, 'It always happens.'" - Gregory Bateson

Includes unlimited streaming of Anti-Ark via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. ... more

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Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

Purchasable with gift card

$9 USD or more

1.	Migration Rights 06:33	buy track
2.	MacyCon '98 04:47	buy track
3.	Professional Ascender 04:48	buy track
4.	Half-Earth 07:55	buy track
5.	Starship And Canoe 01:23	buy track
6.	Human Use 02:14	buy track
7.	Crystal Eyed 03:31	buy track
8.	Self-Described 06:51	buy track
9.	Sillin Keeper 06:49	buy track
10.	Anti-Ark 09:22	buy track
11.	The Myth Of Invariance 07:06	buy track

about

This Sagan consists of Blevin Blectum, Jay Lesser and Wobbly —three solo artists from the San Francisco Bay Area’s legendarily weird electronic music scene, coming together in shared love of Space. Fifteen years in the making, their second album Anti-Ark arrives—a recursive love letter to the early decades of space travel and the High Frontier, when the lines between hard scientific research and emotional wanderlust melted away to reveal an optimistic vision for mankind’s shared future. Explosively kinetic, searingly romantic, the album draws on the trio’s formative influences: the electronic space music which Carl Sagan’s 1980 TV program Cosmos brought to a global audience. Sagan channels the Cosmos sound universe into new compositions, performed live and then folded in on themselves through countless edits into a molecular quilt. The album’s micro-bursts of ambient, meditative and kosmiche are woven into new and denser signals— flying by as if picked up by some satellite hurtling through every civilized universe, moving faster than known physics allows. Any given ten second stretch of Anti-Ark contains a greater density of sound design than might be typically deployed over the course of entire tracks—an attempted inventory not of the objects within the ecosystem, but of the relationships between them. Set against today’s closing windows of opportunity, each sound here contains its own melody and serves as a note within a larger one, a stream of that information which needs to be sung before it can be known.

www.detritus.net/wobbly/saganantiarkinterview.html

"...the Bread-and-Butterfly has wings of bread and butter and a head made of a lump of sugar. Alice says, 'What does it live on?' The answer is, 'Weak tea with cream in it.' At this point she begins to perceive a difficulty: its head will dissolve in its food. So she says, 'What happens if it can't get any?' And the Gnat, who's acting as guide, says, 'It dies.' Alice says, 'That must happen rather often.' The Gnat says, 'It always happens.'"
-Gregory Bateson

"SAGAN is a band consisting of musicians Blevin Blectum, Jason Doerck (Lesser), and Jon Leidecker and video artist Ryan Junell, and they hail from the San Francisco Bay Area. SAGAN released an album in 2004, and this 2 LP set was released in 2021, so it took them sometime to record a new record, although in-between they were all active in other bands and projects. The included music on this vinyl album is an exciting unique weird instrumental cocktail of all kinds of spacey sounds. You might call it 21st century spacey krautrock, but actually it is almost impossible to describe, as there is so much going on here. It does feel like a space adventure that takes you into a different direction everytime. Synthesizers, computers and keyboards dominate here, and just when you think it is indeed CAN, TANGERINE DREAM or KRAFTWERK ish, the sound drastically change into deep house/ambient and then taking a huge dive into something experimental in a way we could also hear on a FROST album, so the absolute open-minded progfans might also want to check this out. On vinyl the sound is massive, and just like any other BROKEN CLOVER RECORDS release, also this album is unique and has a top-notch production, which is really important to make an impact with such underground hi-tech music. On the other hand, here and there it also could fit a modern day experimental sci-fi movie, so maybe you know get an idea what this more or less could sound like. The album is available through brokencloverrecords.bandcamp.com and more information can be found at: saganmusic.bandcamp.com/album/anti-ark

(Points: 8.2 out of 10)"
-Gabor (Strutter'zine)

credits

released April 30, 2021

Blevin Blectum - www.blevinblectum.com
Jay Lesser - www.lsr1.com
Wobbly - www.detritus.net/wobbly/

Mastered by Xopher Davidson
Space colony paintings by Don Davis - www.donaldedavis.com
HD scans courtesy of the artist
Graphic design by Shawn Wolfe

Thanks: Don Davis, Megan Prelinger, Ryan Junell

For Carl Sagan and Gregory Bateson

license

about

Sagan San Francisco, California

shows

May 17

Various Venues, Camden

London, UK

discography

Anti-Ark

Apr 2021
Unseen Forces

Sep 2004
Squibbons

Apr 2004

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