Track Listing

1. Our Alejandro
2. Those Nights
3. Illustional
4. Wasted Time
5. Another Day
6. Safety in Number One
7. Be Back Next Month
8. These Flowers
9. Winter Sleep
10. Bliss Inseclusion
11. Vacant
12. Mountain May

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #64409 in Music
• Released on: 2006-10-31
• Number of discs: 1

Album Description
The Singular LP is an Intamite collection of songs recorded over the past three years between Caludia Deheza (On!Air!Library! and Daylight's for Birds) and Guillermo S Herren (Prefuse 73, Savath and Savalas, among others). They started recording and playing songs together in their downtime from other projects and busy schedules after meeting on a tour they shared. In the beginning, they started with simple lullabies which eventually progressed to more involved pieces, one of which runs almost 15 minutes here. Nonetheless, the "production values" were ignored and all songs keep their natural state evoking the moments they were first played. The focus here lies in the beauty of Claudia's voice and harmonies over the playing of free floating guitars, found sounds, and the occasional drums that sneak in... The magic of this record is in the pureness and fragile state of its form. The simple recording processes and natural "imperfections" of the album overcome recording conventions that would otherwise lose the addictive and sometimes timeless charm it holds.

Lover's rock it is indeed.

Customer Reviews

Subtly unique tunes
At first listen, A Cloud Mireya might come off as fairly run of the mill dreamy neo-folk, but the album is actually a far deeper and more interesting construction than any of the myriad female-fronted trip-hop-ish acts to emerge since the 90's. The personnel will be the draw for most discerning listeners; the record is a whimsical side project of Scott Herren, who has amassed legions of devotees with his inimitable mangling of hip-hop beats via glitch and experimental electronics as Prefuse 73, and Claudia Deheza, one half of the twin-sister vocal team behind the infectious dream-pop group School of Seven Bells, and their more leftfield outfit prior to that, On! Air! Library! All of these acts have put out excellent records brimming with sonic creativity and musical prowess, and to find them coming together is certainly exciting.

Prefuse 73 has won huge acclaim in the realms hip-hop and electronic music, largely pioneering the much-copied stuttery, production-centric instrumental hip-hop style that has since been pigeon-holed as glitch hop or blip hop. His beats are at once smooth and edgy, as warm and organic as they are digital and chopped. A Cloud Mireya, sung by Deheza and produced by Herren, will be a surprise to an unsuspecting Prefuse fan. You won't find any of Prefuse' characteristic hard beats on here, in fact the songs are mostly constructed with gentle guitar parts and soft, unobtrusive percussion supporting Deheza's breathy vocals. Underneath these most obvious elements however, is a fairly wild collage of found sounds and random noises, nearly seamlessly woven into the organic sounds of the songs. A number of tracks shift unpredictably and even unnoticeably from the melodies of the song into experimental abstraction and back again; the soft guitar parts spontaneously devolve into stretched and stuttered washes of noise weaving between the sounds of a crowded street and scattered, unorthodox percussion before drifting calmly back to form for another verse. Thusly, Herren's characteristic approach to production is very much on display, albeit in an understated and profoundly appropriate manner. His gleeful tweaking of live recordings never overpowers the vocal core of the songs, and in fact provides a unique environment for them that elevates this album above what might've been just a lot of guitar and vocal tunes in the hands of less insightful musicians.

Deheza's distinctive vocals, husky and dark and wrapped effortlessly around carefully conceived melodies, provide the focus of the album. The dizzying harmonies of School of Seven Bells are not present, rather the songs focus on simple melodies, which Deheza delivers with an almost meditative softness. The drawn-out notes abstract the lyrics and tunes into a layer of sound that sinks into Scott-Heron's lightly twisted soundscapes and further humanizes the electronics, already made more real and earthy by pervasive acoustic guitar parts. Deheza's voice and the guitar form a familiar center out of which the subtly electrified production flows, and the result is a sonic space that is somewhere between a casual coffee shop performance and outer space.

The thing that really got me with this album was when I noticed the completely abstract sounds that Scott-Heron had woven together underneath the songs. It makes the folky sound of Deheza's singing so much more unorthodox and yet seems completely natural at the same time. The two artists' history of weird experimentalism is no doubt the source of this unique take on recording. It marks a significant stylistic departure from most of their other projects, but the characteristic imaginations and musical savvy of Deheza and Herren are as strong as ever and reliably provide music that is as interesting as it is refreshing to listen to.