The pieces that make up Amaro are what happens when you take a bunch of citrus and herbs and ferment them together, and then distill them. “Trafic” video premiere.
An album driven by praxis
Press Release — Amaro (Thirsty Leaves, 2021) is a solo record built out of multidisciplinary duets, and with all of the improvisation, collaboration, refracted and pattern-based composition, and aleatoricism, that Jeremy Young has been feeding into his live practice for years. It’s an album driven by praxis. These pieces each started with improvisations and “tone clusters” from Young’s home studio; then deconstructed and fragmented into short musical ideas; then sent to artist friends and cohorts very meaningful to his career to respond to. There were no rules, no bad ideas, and no other prompts. Young reacted and reconfigured the works based on the feedback and resonance returned from my collaborators—and in the end, it turned into an organic, “live feel” record of simple, yet bold musical statements. The pieces that make up Amaro are what happens when you take a bunch of citrus and herbs and ferment them together, and then distill them.
Tomonari Nishikawa — “A 100-foot roll of 16mm film was exposed to light and hand-processed, and it has been scratched through a projector dozens of times. The visual shows the footage at different stages of this process.”
Jeremy Young — “Tomonari Nishikawa is a filmmaker whose works I’ve scored and performed alongside live many times before. Additionally, we’ve collaborated and improvised together live, with sound and image, often as part of his double slide-projector performance practice. But on Amaro, I wanted him to contribute to the album in a sonic capacity for a change of pace. He set up a microphone and recorded himself opening up and manipulating his various 16mm cameras and projectors, which I then layered into my track in a bric-a-brac manner, reminiscent of our shared admiration for Stan Brakhage. Now that he’s created a no-camera 16mm printed film, some kind of unusual oblong circle has finally been completed!”
Jeremy Young’s Amaro is available on Thirsty Leaves Music. [Bandcamp]
