set fire to flames are a collective of thirteen musicians from the musical community of Montreal. Brooding and beautiful, haunted and haunting, sings reign rebuilder is so stunningly / lovingly played and skillfully assembled, infused throughout with a massive sense of slow-burning tension and periods of weighty, rousing release.

Initially the idea was to gather a group of folks together in a members montreal apartment and record as much as they could over a five day period. As set fire to flames explains, “…[we wanted] to conduct the whole five day recording session like a series of experiments… to get lost in the sound as it was actually happening… to make the whole recording an exploded intense event… to push tolerance levels and limitations with a group of people sonically… to become shut-ins… to operate on no sleep/confinement/ intoxication… some of us were interested in seeing what would actually happen if we attempted to record improvised drones and textures under those conditions… and what impact that might have on yr. head… how individual/collective tension would play out… and what the end result would sound like… so a lot of experimentation with tolerance, repetition and duration… drones…”

“And so these set fire to flames recordings happened… we piled all of the gear into the first floor (kitchen/living room) of this old, falling down apartment in montreal (the place has a crazy history to it…built in 1878…used to be a 10¢ shoe shine parlour and a brothel in the forties)… the control/mixing room was in a bedroom on the second floor (up a rickety wooden staircase)… you can hear the house all over the recording… (the staircase/ groaning floorboards/creaking chairs/traffic and police cars outside/men coming out of the mosque downstairs)… all of these sounds became an important part of the final recording…”

“Five days of continuous recording netted us roughly twelve hours of raw sound… all of it was hacked apart and later rebuilt… and the final document of that five day period (which was magic and the fucking house was levitating…..) now makes up ‘sings reign rebuilder’… the record is about 60% improvised and 40% composed… the five-day recording stint turned into something more than originally intended… it wasn’t just thirteen people droning aimlessly to infinity… things worked out somehow and we got lucky…”

Packaged in beautiful full-colour gate-fold heavy paper jacket, including a 24 page booklet. Available as a single compact disc or a double vinyl.

This title is being released by Alien8 Recordings for the territory of North America only. A new label by the folks at Fat Cat will release the CD and vinyl for Europe and the UK. P-Vine will release the CD for Japan.

Release