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Brittle Paper Cathedrals [Expanded & Remastered]

by Milieu

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  • Streaming + Download

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

    Get all 242 Milieu releases available on Bandcamp and save 90%.

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Across the Surface of the Water, Mural Hex, Divergent Paths [Volume Five], Focussed Light, Aeolian Yellow, Snow Maps, Snow Maps, Winter Displacement, and 234 more. , and , .

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  • Limited Edition 2xCD-R Reissue
    Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    Made by hand, one copy at a time, in the White Pillar Workshop! Two white 5" recordable discs, duplicated and printed via an Imation D20, held securely inside a Guided dual-digipack made of 100% recycled cardboard, ornately decorated with a 3x3" matte cover photo sticker (printed in Atlanta by David Tagg) and custom text sticker work on the inside gatefolds and back cover. Also contains two paperstock inserts beneath the two discs, cut from the same patterned material that was used for the original 2009 cover art, to better protect your CD-Rs from scratching when removing or replacing them from the packaging. Shipped inside a safe and soft bubble mailer.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Brittle Paper Cathedrals [Expanded & Remastered] via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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Sand Dunes 10:49
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Sand Dunes 10:19
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Dialogue Six 05:08

about

Originally issued in April 2009, Brittle Paper Cathedrals has remained a somewhat under-the-radar Milieu album. In many ways, it was drafted as a kind of travelogue, to illustrate the different pastoral fields, oceanside stretches and sad dusky evenings that Milieu was host to across a span of five years.

Looking back at it now, it is easy to imagine parts of this album comfortably appearing on other albums. The four-part Rural Dialogues suite could have been included on the countryside eclogue Silver Horns Heard Over Green Hills, with its warped guitar source material and filter-passed texture beds. The first of the two Imagined Histories pieces recalls striking similarities to the Nine Billion Names album, full of delayed organ feedback trails and pedal bass hum, while the second part feels right in between the first two Ocean Lion albums and Phosphene Weather, burbling restrained chords and melodies over a slow two-note bass motif. Finally, the closing two-track suite of Sand Dunes immediately conjures up reference points of Brother's endless sad refrains and the nautically blissed out Beyond The Sea/Stars recordings for Infraction Records three years before.

Perhaps this is why the album has gone out of print and unattended for over nine years now - that it always felt so fractured between these crystalline sonic identities, that it never really belonged to itself. The title, whose original meaning has been lost to me now, seems to outline this fragility, and emphasize the macrocosmic grandeur found within barely held together aural ecosystems. Truly, remastering this material was a challenge, as much of it was generated using very low-fidelity equipment and recording processes, and the entirety of the album's voice resides within a very narrow set of frequency bands, where even the slightest equalizer nudge can offset the temperature of the atmosphere a whole lot. I can, however, report that I am happier now with the sound of these pieces than I was when I released them.

To support this reissue edition, I've also included the out of print Dialogue Five EP, which was an outtake from the Rural Dialogues session, as well as a sixth Rural Dialogues session cut, omitted for some reason at the time. Perhaps inevitably, I have also spent considerable time drafting a Coppice Halifax excavation of the original Sand Dunes session, which runs just over forty minutes long and provides a modern counterpoint to the album proper. Also updated is the album's artwork - which was previously a simple wallpaper pattern I reproduced - now a black and white photograph from the ravine behind my current studio.

credits

released November 30, 2018

W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded at Rolling Knoll in Columbia, South Carolina, 2008-2009. Originally released on April 12, 2009. Remastered by The Analog Botanist at the White Pillar Workshop, Autumn 2018. Photography and text by ABM&D. This is Milieu Music number AD38, and 38th in the Arboreal Digest reissue catalog.

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about

Milieu Dayton, Ohio

Psychedelic electronic music, sun-warmed analog ambient and sci-fi braindance, for cats, aliens and epicureans alike.

I also release music as Coppice Halifax: coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com

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