BIG TINGS! VLSI have announced the pre launch of my debut album “Olivine Window”, and it’s set to release to the general public on July 21 on Bandcamp. You can pre order it either the digital version or thevery limited hand numbered cassette version (or just add it tor your wishlist and buy it when it comes available) by visiting the following link
https://sareemone.bandcamp.com/album/olivine-window
New Content, New Direction: SareemOne
“What did you do in the lockdown?” Well… quite a lot happened. Miko and I got divorced, I moved to Custom House in East London and during the move I started to look at my electric guitar again and wondered if I could do something with it. It had been a while since I’d played anything; the last gigs with Sinking Cruise Ship Rescue Drama were in the long, long ago, in the time before time and I was very rusty. At the back of my mind an old motivation appeared - “What about that guitar looping thing that Robert Fripp did between 1970s King Crimson and 1980s King Crimson? You always thought that could be something to explore.”
That “guitar looping thing” was known by the term ‘Frippertronics’ (although the technique was developed by Brian Eno) and was created by running tape between two reel to reel tape machines, one recording and one playing back what the other machine had recorded. This allowed for really long delay times, as much as 6 seconds of delay; something that hadn’t been achieved before. Robert Fripp used the technique to add a single notes that would repeat and via a mixing desk get rerecorded again to which Robert would apply another note and, combined with the sound degrading each time it gets recorded again on tape, over time these big ambient soundscapes would occur. If you dig out Robert Fripp‘s classic “Let The Power Fall” LP on EG you will hear recordings that he made using this technique on a solo tour of cafes, bars, record shops and hotel lobbies, but after that the technique mostly was forgotten about.
Time passes slowly… and not only does technology catch up with this idea, with digital delay pedals being capable of record minutes of delay, but so does Digital Sound Processing in modelling the sound of tape decay and now you can buy “tape delay” pedals that can create loops over 20 seconds and allow one to control the exact amount of tape wrinkle, hiss, age, wow and flutter to ones heart’s content so, I buy one - a Strymon “El Capitstan” - and I set about trying out this technique. Suffice it to say I was hooked.
Months of recordings (and hundreds of pounds of other guitar pedals) later and now I have the birth of SareemOne to declare. My old musical compadres from SCSRD - Sam and Henry (now making a glorious sound in Dog Unit) - offered me a slot opening their “Dog Unit and Friends” residency at Servant Jazz Quarters, Dom and Andy from Echaskech (who have been my sanity sounding board throughout this whole endeavour) have offered me a release on cassette and digital on their VLSI imprint which should be coming out very soon, and a couple of weeks ago Dom, Andy and I went off to a cottage Wales to do some recording…
I am ridiculously excited about the whole thing and incredibly humbled by the feedback and support I’ve been given and I really cannot wait to share with you all this music.
For more regular updates there’s a SareemOne instagram account & twitter
For now you can have a listen to some of the demo tracks on Soundcloud