Over the past decade, Washington DC emigre James Ginzburg has released a plethora of material under assorted pseudonyms, co-founded Bristol’s Multiverse organisation (with Rob ‘Pinch’ Ellis, Paul Jebanasam and James Fiddian) and established low-frequency research unit Emptyset (with Paul Purgas). In Spring 2013, Ginzburg will reveal a hitherto undisclosed talent for psych-pop songcraft when new project Faint Wild Light makes its debut via Digitalis. Similarly distinct from the bass-heavy explorations for which he is best known, Ginzburg’s mix for the OC is described by the producer as “a musical pause, a gap between years.”
1. William Basinski ‘Vivian & Ondine’
“Ideally all albums would be comprised of one repetitive track that played off until infinity. Conveniently, this piece, while only being 45:10, can be looped for an infinite listening experience.”
2. Penguin Cafe Orchestra ‘The Snake And The Lotus’
“A touchingly somber guitar and shaker.”
3. Hans Zimmer ’Journey To The Line’
“From the soundtrack to Terrence Malick’s excellent and somewhat overlooked The Thin Red Line. Hans does Arvo Part meets Steve Reich.”
4. Brian Eno ‘Thursday Afternoon’
“According to my itunes I have listened to this album for 187 hours over the course of the last year.”
5. Rachmaninov ‘Piano Concerto #4 In G Minor, Op. 40 - 2. Largo.1’
“To me this sounds like an ever-frustrated aspiration towards happiness, though perhaps it’s something of an auditory inkblot test, and to you it sounds like drunken 19th century Russian aristocrats grieving over their late night gambling losses.”
6. Goldmund ‘Image Autumn Womb’
“They slept profoundly, desperately, greedily, as though for the last time, as though they had been condemned to stay awake forever and had to drink in all the sleep in the world during these last hours.” - Narcissus And Goldmund, Herman Hesse
7. Susumu Yokota ‘Azukiiro No Kaori’
“My CD player broke and got stuck on this track for six hours sometime around 2002. At the time I thought that time was just passing very slowly.”
8. William Basinski ‘Melancholia II’
“What I wouldn’t give to have my Melancholies sound like this.”
9. Arvo Part ‘Fratres For Eight Cellos’
“I heard this for the first time towards the end of a week I spent on my own in middle of nowhere Wales during which I didn’t listen to any music. When I finally couldn’t bear silence any longer I put this on and I stared out a window at a half mined out mountain and I cried over that mountain for a while.”
10. Johan Johannason ‘Melodia (I)’
“This tangentially reminded me of the section of Vivaldi’s The Rite Of Spring as its appears in the sequence in which the dinosaurs all die in Fantasia until I went back and watched it again and realised it had a less than vague, if any, connection to it. It does, however, work as an alternative soundtrack to that scene, if one is inclined to try it. If not, one can simply just imagine a terminally ill diplodocus while listening.”
11. Vigh Mihaly ‘Valuska’
“This piece is from the opening scene of Bela Tarr’s Werckmeister’s Harmonies in which closing time Hungarian drunks act out an eclipse in a stumbling dance.”
12. Nils Frahm ‘Keep’
“We tried to catch Nils Frahm’s set when we were at Decibel festival Seattle this September. Having driven up Mt Ranier to catch the sunset, we raced back to town and ran into the venue to find we had got the performance time wrong. We heard the final piece, this tune, through the auditorium doors, blocked from even entering.”
13. Basic Channel ‘Q1.2’
“As if when the techno rapture came the kick drum was saved and taken up into the heavens leaving just a synth to peacefully mourn the end of days and the vacuum left behind.”
14. Roly Porter ‘Caladan’
“Above and beyond its Asimovian textures and existential angst, it is the peculiar causality of Roly’s music that I find most interesting. Nothing happens when or in a way that I expect, so I always have the sense I’m peering through a window into to something that doesn’t belong in this universe.”
15. Paul Jebanasam ‘Book Of Revelations’
“This is a studio recording of this track that never has seen release. A live version of it features on Paul’s Music For The Church Of St John The Baptist on our label Subtext. The instrumentation is Viola and Viole-de-Gambe both performed by Bristol’s Phil Owen.”
16. Max Richter ‘Spring 1’
“Max Richter flipping Vivaldi. It reminds me of the 1998 trance classic by Binary Finary titled ‘1998’.”
17. Ash Ra Tempel ‘Quasarsphere’
“If one evening I were to strip off all my clothes in a fit of lysergic revelatory ecstasy and ooze out of my front door, a polychromatic puddle of transcendent confusion, I would have the heavenly declarative trumpets play this to forewarn the doormat.”
18. Pink Floyd ‘Echoes’
“One of my favorite records, ever. When I first listened to it in our new studio on our super hi-res monitors I noticed that they didn’t noise gate the vocals and you can hear the sound of David Gilmour’s saliva in the gaps between phrases.”
19. Squarepusher ‘Iambic 5 Poetry’
“I bought this on vinyl in 1999 after I’d lived in England for about a year, so it conjures up that slightly odd, ill-adjusted and malformed part of my life.”
20. Herbie Hancock ‘Butterfly’
“From Thrust, I think this is best mellow track of the early 70s Hancock stuff. I thought that a ride of the cosmic love machine was a suitable place to end a mix that threatened at times to be earnest and heartfelt.”
