back to
Polyfold Music
We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Post Human Folk Dances

by Peyton Pleninger

/
  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $10 USD  or more

     

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.

about

Post human: a person or entity that exists in a state beyond being human

Folk dance: a dance developed by people that reflects the life of the people of a certain place

This is the dance record for the cultures of the future.

I developed a lot of this music playing on the street, always searching for what makes people dance. Within this question are investigations into rhythmic feel, the different movements and limbs that come into play, the biological function underlying different ways of dancing, etc. In August 2021, I went with Joel to his beach cabin in Long Beach Washington, and continued to ask these questions in what has become one of my favorite places in the world.

Joel and I had been discussing some ideas about remote recording for a couple years already, as I’ve always been deeply attracted to playing in outdoor spaces. All the natural movements happening (the rhythm of the waves, the hum of the wind) give another layer to the rhythmic palette I’m working with. This is where the post human element comes into play too - I believe we as humans are headed in a direction where our knowledge and our sense perceptions are less bound by our corporeality, while also being more acutely aware of subtle biological sensations. Our music will be more connected to the feeling of the moment (a feeling which may be physical, energetic, metaphysical, etc.)

So thinking about certain archaic values of human consciousness, chiefly the mystical connection to a numinous environment, and then combining that with ideas about non-biological knowing and new modes of music making - what would that sound like?

All of the tracks began as improvisations. Joel and I spent the first 6 days going to different locations around Long Beach - the beach, a mountain clearing, an abandoned fort - to record improvisations. Then we would bring the recordings back to the cabin to overdub different parts, synthesizer spirits, smoke monsters and amplified heartbeats.

Many of the original improvisations take the form of an imagined dance style. The Cervical Spiral takes its inspiration from the Gnawa who spiral their upper spine while they play. The Quadruped Dance comes from playing for my ex-girlfriend while she retrained her body after an injury. The Lumbar Lean is the dance feeling that feels most natural to me.

Huge thanks go to my mentor, Milford Graves, for his inspiration behind so many of the ideas present in this recording, to Joel for rolling with my wildest ideas, and my parents, Sharon and Andy, for their unwavering support.

-Peyton Pleninger


It’s one thing to conceptualize a record and create a world, it’s another to physically travel to a world to make a record. Peyton and I had been talking about making a “location record” ever since we lived in a small apartment in Bushwick together and I never could have guessed it would turn into one of my favorite life experiences. Instead of following our initial plan and recording in the tunnels and amphitheater in Central Park, we traveled to my childhood retreat in the small peninsula town of Long Beach Washington.

The goal for this record was for Peyton to be able to musically play with his environment and also be inspired by the intricacies and vastness of nature. To do this, I put together a mobile recording rig powered by a 700 watt battery and a garden utility cart to take our recording studio adventure into the wild. In Long Beach we were able to record in a network of concrete underground tunnels, a fibonacci spiral shaped structure amongst an endless field of dunegrass, in front of an echoing mountain rock face in a sandy evergreen forest, and even on the beach right next to the Ocean herself. This nomadic way of recording reflected Peyton’s recent musical lifestyle in New York City playing every night on the waterfront or in Washington Square Park, or wherever he didn’t get yelled at (although sometimes that didn’t matter).

My job as the engineer and tour guide was to find specific locations in Long Beach that are inspiring both physically and musically. Having visited there every year since I was born (about 20 conscious years if 5 years old is when you ‘come to’) I was excited to explore the area with fresh intentions. The most surprising location to me was at the southern end of the 26 mile long beach where a huge rock face sat next to a clearing of evergreens on the sand at Beard’s Hollow. The novelty of pulling a 10 input studio through the forest was so freeing and exciting I thought to myself, “this has to be the future of recording”. I positioned two AKG 414s in ORTF facing away from Peyton and toward the rock face to capture him communicating with the echo it produced. We returned to this location a few times and it produced the track Slaying The Mountain which solidified our vision for the record. You can hear the delay even better in Edging.

Another particularly interesting recording setup was at the concrete Fibonacci Spiral at the Willapa Bay Wildlife refuge. What was supposed to be an aesthetically pleasing bench ended up being an inspiring study on capturing time compression and delay. Peyton sat in the middle of the spiral playing directly into an SM7B and then I put the ORTF 414s at the end/mouth of the spiral. The distance between the two mics created an echoing delay and stereoizing effect as the sound waves were shaped by this fractal path. The delay time and stereo image would change based on how deep the 414s were into the spiral. All the while Peyton could stare off into the distant island and observe birds fishing and darting around the tall dune grass. You can hear this effect featured in Cervical Spiral, Jupiter Mercury Axis and The Center of Pangea, and Ionic Rainforest.

In between recording sessions we would hike around the hills foraging for mushrooms, talking and exploring the teachings and concepts from Peyton’s late mentor Milford Graves. His spirit and the time Peyton spent with him were some of the biggest inspirations for this project. I too had the privilege of meeting Prof. Graves after I attended a showing of his documentary Full Mantis in New York. I met with him a second time at his exhibit in the Queens Museum amongst his musical EKG algorithms and sculptures depicting the biological and spiritual significance of different African drums. Both times I left inspired to explore life in my own ways and strive to learn and carry out everything at the highest level. Really it’s deeper than that but I don’t have that kind of time to explain. While Peyton and I were filling our baskets full of Reishi and Chanterelle mushrooms we were exploring Milford-inspired ideas like using all of our senses to meet a plant or moving like an animal to better navigate the underbrush. We were theorizing about “energy families” and different
ways plants use fractals to “tendril” their way around their environments. One of Peyton’s performance goals was to contact Milford’s spirit through music and this was one of the ways we fostered his presence within us.

These experiences were critical for my understanding of how we would shape the record with overdubs. The core of the music is Peyton improvising using saxophone and various percussive bells, which felt very human. Hearing the echoes and ambient nature sounds of the spaces we visited also felt natural, but we wanted to aim for beyond human and “natural” sounds. Milford was transcribing rhythms of heartbeats with computer algorithms and audio processing techniques and that was the kind of stuff we were trying to get to.

It was Peyton’s turn to continue the heartbeat studies in his record. The track Eskaton (a title inspired by Terence McKenna) features a rumbling mechanical sound generated from a recording of Peyton’s heartbeat that Milford recorded with his own stethoscope. We took the heartbeat and used Ableton Live’s time processing algorithms to generate a turbulent tonal sound. We then put the affected sound into Sampler to be performed with the Ableton Push. At the end of the track you can hear the sound slowly morph back into the heartbeat it originally came from.

Continuing this idea of beyond human, we took every opportunity in the overdubbing sessions to turn Peyton into a mecha-musical cyborg. Slaying The Mountain and Mountain Dance Illusion are two great examples of recording Peyton’s throat and vocal percussion and processing them to feel like giant other-worldly drums. We also used fine tuned pitch shifting to microtonally harmonize saxophones at the end of Polydimensional Slide. For Ionic Rainforest we recorded ourselves striking kitchen bowls with a singing bowl mallet into Ableton’s sampler to create the intro and outro sequences. Another fun one was when we multiplied ourselves by overdubbing a whole drum ensemble (and Hydroflask solo) on location in an underground concrete cavern for Select Your Resistance. A similar technique was used to create crowd noise in the last track, Most Joyous Occasion For The Peasants. We also found a way to use the computer to bend time to Peyton’s advantage. We were inspired by tape recording techniques we heard/inferred one morning in a Frank Zappa record where it sounded like some of the instruments were being played inhumanly fast but somehow maintaining their natural pitches. We copied this by taking a whole song and slowing it down to half speed, recording Peyton playing a cowbell, significantly shifting the cowbell’s pitch down, and then speeding it all up together varispeed back to normal to create a seemingly virtuosic hand drum performance. You can hear this technique in Cervical Spiral in the form of a low tom-like drum playing rolling rhythms.

This is only 1 of 3 whole albums we came up with from all the recordings we made. Peyton had experiences where he really felt like he contacted Milford, and experienced some deep human emotions in a pitch black concrete dungeon, and that alone makes this record a huge success. There are so many epiphanies and endless hours of philosophical conversations and beautiful adventures stored in this album, it’s a shame we still don’t have the technology to store entire full body experiences like Charlie Bone would get from just a photograph. Instead what you have here is a truly unique album to sonically enjoy. Maybe you can feel what Peyton was going for. Just like everyone says on instagram, use headphones for the best experience (or a good hifi system).

-Joel Gardella

credits

released June 21, 2022

Peyton Pleninger - Tenor saxophone, bells, vocals, percussion, album art
Joel Gardella - Recording, production, mixing, peasant voices, hand claps and water bottle
Dana White - Mastering
Ben Rolston - Graphic design
Recorded August 27-September 1, 2021 in Long Beach, Washington

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Peyton Pleninger Stone Ridge, New York

contact / help

Contact Peyton Pleninger

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

If you like Peyton Pleninger, you may also like: