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The Loneliness Of Empty Roads [10th Anniversary Expanded Remaster]

by Milieu

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    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 Expanded Reissue
    Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    Assembled 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 inside a clear cast-polypropylene jacket with a flap and a cloth membrane separating/cushioning the discs, with two hand-cut white cardstock inserts bearing a 4x4" glossy photographic print (reproducing the Holga CFN-120 photograph from the first edition ten years prior) and a white text sticker. Ships securely inside a bubblemailer to keep your new sonic artifact dust and moisture-free.

    Includes unlimited streaming of The Loneliness Of Empty Roads [10th Anniversary Expanded Remaster] via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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about

From the Second Sun press release, 2010:

"Heralding the return of rust-orange days and cool blue nights, Milieu's first new full-length at SSR since 2008 is an elegant and minimal affair. Comprised of three long tracks, all improvised and recorded live to tape with no overdubs, The Loneliness Of Empty Roads sees Brian at the guitar, unaccompanied, driving through the uninhabited backroads and highways of his subconscious. This is a blues album, reduced to single chords and clusters of notes. A live broadcast from an unmappable location to a humming car radio. Power lines and the occasional streetlight pass by, but nothing breaks the monochrome repetition of straight lines, static speeds and the hope of arriving at your destination soon. For those of you still finding your way home, here's one for the road."

From the author, 2020:

It's difficult to believe that it's already been ten years since Empty Roads was released, and eleven since it was recorded live on my old Technics M11 cassette deck in the Rolling Knoll studio. It was the last Milieu recording issued at SSR before the label took a decade-long hiatus, which is what makes revisiting it here and now seem to surrealistic to me. Sitting at a desk in a basement studio in snow-covered Ohio, drinking coffee, South Carolina feels even further away than the six-hundred miles of measurement would indicate.

Time is always the great eraser, and ten years into the lifespan of an album that was built from the perspective of moving on with my life, this feels truer than it's ever been, with so many topical and subsurface examples to point out. The photograph on the cover was taken in the backlot of the Horry County Memorial Library, the place that felt more like my home than the house I lived in when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, because I was certainly there all the time. At the moment of that photograph, in March 2010, the library was already closed down and relocated to a newer structure elsewhere, the building used for storage or some other mundane thing after the integrity of the architecture had itself been compromised due to age.

By March of 2010, I was myself already several years removed from that library, and the entire Conway and Myrtle Beach area, having married my Russian queen and moved inland, to live in the shade of the Columbia water tower in 2005. I was revisiting all the old well-tread paths for memory's sake, to document it with Holga cameras, digital video, a Tascam DR-07 recorder and the faultiest documentarian of all, my own fried brain. It was a purpose-led trip, mostly done in the name of research for the pending release of Summer's Parting Ways (which has, ironically, waited until 2020 to be published at Attacknine), which as an album and project, was centrally composed to reference mostly places in that area. Another album about moving on with my life, through making peace with my past and crystallizing it into some kind of sifted, distilled substance to imbibe with whenever nostalgia struck me.

I've always felt that artists in particular have a special talent that no one knows about, and it isn't the ability to write music or perform athletically on instruments or stages, but rather, it is the power to process the past, to mine it for riches, to editorialize it for the alleviation of trauma or the surgical-removal of regret, to compartmentalize what remains of that final walk backwards and shove it into a box in the basement, hastily labeled "Old Stuff" with or without a date for context, and to really truly move past it. We can use this ability consciously, turning the path of time's erasure against itself, and we can get away with it too. You're not talking about touching up the Mona Lisa, you're just keeping up with your mental health.

So, back to Empty Roads - the roads invoked in the title were and are a very specific stretch of highway between Main Street in Conway and my father's house in Loris, about a half hour's drive. Almost always empty, and especially so at night, which was often when I found myself driving on them, it was also the time and place I did much of my considering, before this whole Milieu-thing would even be a name on a sheet of notebook paper. Those roads were also the lonely ones, always filled with the slow filling up of regret after going to a party, or being stood up by a girl at some terrible punk rock show, the long comedown clarity you can only really find by spending time with yourself, by yourself, sitting still. Empty roads are a wonderful eraser too, just like time, and what is time anyway except one long empty road in one long empty direction? "One foot on the gas and one in the grave", a line from a record I played to death in my teens feels apt here.

However, it would be remiss to become all maudlin and depressive and think of emptiness as only the opposite of fullness. Emptiness can be a beautiful thing, a simple open wonderment, room to grow, distance away from somewhere/one/thing, space fertile with the seeds of the future. It is this definition of emptiness and the visual symbolism of an empty road that I would like to consider relevant today, ten years into the dust caked on these sad guitar tapes. I myself feel disconnected and absent from the Brian Grainger I hear playing these guitar wails in a dingy bedroom studio late at night. He is long gone and far away, held safely inside the confines of this recording. It feels good to not have to be him anymore, to have reckoned with whatever loneliness he felt the need to convey here. Perhaps it's just what happens when you're as prolific as I am, and self-aware of the creative act being such a natural part of your ability to even live and breathe, that you don't quite realize the lifetimes that pass you by between seasons of inspiration and droughts of threadbare survival. Today, things are tough, but they are fruitful enough that I feel like I can say they're better, not better in a positive or negative sense, but better in that they are different. Better because I must have taken my own subconscious advice ten years ago, and in casting out these meditations on an empty road running through the deep Carolinian country in the middle of the night, I just kept moving forward, outward, away from those sad lands and further into the sunshine of my windy valley, contented and calm.

NOTE: This reissue includes a second disc containing a DREAM COMPOST mix of the Empty Roads album. This is a previously unreleased session that transfigures the Empty Roads recordings themselves using a generative modular system and a sampler, and may appeal to fans of albums like PHOSPHENE WEATHER or THRIAMBUS as well.

credits

released December 4, 2020

W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded at Rolling Knoll, late Summer/early Autumn, 2009. Remastered by The Analog Botanist at White Pillar, Autumn 2020. Photograph taken by Brian, March 2010, at HCML using a modified Holga CFN120 with 35mm film. Text by SSR/ABM&D. Special thanks to David Tagg for his guidance, wisdom and optimism. This is Milieu Music number AD57, issue #57 in the Arboreal Digest reissue catalog. milieu-music.com analogbotany.com 17463.space

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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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