Celer

Artist: Celer
P: 2007 / 2010
LTD: 1000
In “Generic City”, the Artists recorded so many “local” sounds in each country. Soundscapes which were obtained in two countries, being kept in original shapes or being heavily processed, were cropped, mixed with each other, combined with carefully contributed instrument sounds and finally worked as another new “time space”. It leaps the reality. This album is the record of a series of special travels delivered from three young artists who can rebuild a new world by sounds with grounded skills. I’d love to listen to it, with closed eyes.

Artist: Celer
P: 2009
The duo of Celer is comprised of husband and wife Will Long and Danielle Baquet- Long. Using processed strings, pianos, regional field recordings, and electronics, Celer has composed a masterpiece of sentimental experiences and realism; the sound of raw emotion..Tender and touching, yet poignant and stirring, Close Proximity and the Unhindered Care-all is composed of 3 parts that encapsulate over an hour of music, and on-location field recordings. Part 1 creeps quietly through your room until its presence is felt, fading, and field recordings are bringing back distant memories. Part 2 starts on a melancholy note and ends in a sea of stunning ambience, drifing, and fizzling out. Part 3 embraces and carries you off to a distant, but strangely comforting world where it shares its secrets with you, and yet disappears at the peak of discovery. It is an honor for SRA to be able to share with you this masterpiece of sound art by Dani and Will, and we hope it brings comfort to a world where things are often taken for granted and then forgotten. When listening to such a heart-rending album, itʼs hard not to feel somehow connected with the glowing love Dani and Will undoubtedly have shared, and Celer will always be remembered, and cherished in this way.Packaged in a 8 panel classic digipack with a matte UV finish, the artwork consists of poetry by Dani, and layout, design, and cover photography by Johnny Utterback.

Artist: Celer
P: 2010
The music of Will Thomas Long’s and Danielle Baquet-Long’s Celer is an absorbing combination of classic ambient, minimalism, and perhaps as the most distinct characteristic overwhelming romanticism. Longing, melancholy, nostalgia, and the like seem to be recurring themes in Will and Dani’s works.
Engaged Touches begins with hypnotic sounds of a train clattering on its tracks. This departure seems to set the whole piece into a context of travel and distance, moving away from and towards something, someone. After a while these sounds give way to a rousing, majestic set of string loops. Similar phases of different field recordings and grandiose loops take turns throughout the whole work. This brings about a dynamics of contrasts: the concrete and the abstract, the particular and the general, the mundane and the exalted, and so on. The phases of string loops take up most of the album and evoke a yearning feeling of distance, grand and epic. The title, Engaged Touches, however, refers to quite the opposite, the close and intimate. It feels as if it is these kinds of touches that the string loops wailingly, albeit very gracefully, long for. Engaged Touches is another beautiful addition to the rapidly growing body of work by Celer.

Artist: Celer
P: 2009
In Escaping Lakes' is the sequel to 'Cursory Asperses', previously released on Slow Flow. Where 'Cursory Asperses' focused on the slow movement primarily of streams, and other field recordings, 'In Escaping Lakes' continues this pathway to expand into a deeper subject, of lakes and their surroundings. Inspired by a painting by Anthony Feyer, 'In Escaping Lakes' was made to demonstrate enclosure, depth, and closeness in still places.

Artist: Celer
P: 2007 / 2010
Recorded in 2006/2007, "Panoramic Dreams..." invites the listener in a more deep and intense travel than usual.Bigger, stronger, but still full of love and melancoly. Mastered early 2010 by Taylor Deupree.
Opening in medias res with field recordings that slowly shift into a haze of hovering tones, Will and Dani's loop- based constructions flicker and unfurl at an unhurried pace, ebbing into one another, decaying into resonant silence. Indeed, “Panoramic Dreams..." proves to be an apt title for this collection, as each track enacts a sort of bleary-eyed navigation of an imagined landscape. There is a profound sense of melancholy in these recordings, but also a subjunctive quality that is hard to ignore- a meditation on possibility, on what might come to pass. Like the best Celer recordings, the four tracks collected here evoke in this listener a sense oflonging and nostalgia, the object of which remains opaque and elusive, but ultimately no less affecting. Recommended.

Artist: Celer
P: 2007 / 2010
Celer is the sound, visual, literary, and artistic endeavor of the husband and wife duo of Will Long and Danielle Baquet-Long. The album was recorded during a three day journey driving across the US from California to Mississippi, while the musician couple spent their days at a small hotel in Northern Texas. During these three days, they realized the concept of ‘Pockets of Wheat/Exteriors’, created illustrations for their intent of the music and penned down a library of notes and structures to use. Hence, made many field recordings and string recordings with equipment brought along, while other piano pieces were recorded later on an old, unused family piano.From their room at the back of the hotel, they saw endless stretches of wheat fields. With open windows, the couple noticed the constant sound of the wheat blowing from the wind, an almost gentle, yet persistent, crackling and fuzz, but also changed constantly. Creating music in their original form, drawing on feelings of togetherness, intimacy, and the expansiveness surrounding them, with the ever-changing landscape, the concept of ‘Pockets of Wheat/Exteriors’ was perceived. With associations to the ghost of Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows, in entirety founded in nature, perceptions arose through constant interpretation of the sounds of nature; aggression, subtlety, intimacy, and distance.Roughly five hours of recordings of cello, violin, piano, bells, crickets, and wind were then applied the idea of an ‘always changing but always the same’ idea to it. Splicing the recordings to about hundred 5-10 second tape loops, the loops were then played back from laptops and repeated in arbitrarily selected order by the two musicians without predetermined order. As such, the movements of the wheat in the fields by the winds were mimicked: always similar, but constantly changing.The enclosed recording contains 7 movements, though they are strung together not to break the continuity. The several layers found within the recording are not always discernible, but are still there, just more subtle, as is the case with details in nature. Nature’s presence is also an imperative, though not the sole inspiration, but in the end the music of Celer in Pockets of Wheat expresses purely their feelings, identity and the atmosphere surrounding these moments, and in keeping with a continuous recording, captures the essence of what is heard in our daily lives, essentially one singular thing: sound.Limited CD in lovely oversized card pack

Artist: Celer
P: 2008
13 tracks in one go of pure ambient bliss with silky tones lighting the air then gently retreating until the next wave. The sounds of field recordings and unidentifiable sound sources lurk in the distance among the detailed layers of sound. Gorgeous stuff and a pretty essential partner if you got the first disc.

Artist: Celer
P: 2012
“ In the winter of 2009, i spent two months living and working a short-term job in photography and surveying in South Alberta, Canada. Aside from the job, it gave me the opportunity to work further on " Without Retrospect, the Morning ", the final part of the water-themed trilogy of albums that included the previous releases Cursory Asperses and In Escaping Lakes. Some days the snow would be so heavy the sun would never show, and ice covered the windows in the mornings. The wind rushed up the banks of the nearby mountains, and whipped against the buildings. I had brought with me two Sony Tapecorder open reels, and a box of tapes of recordings from the past six months of piano and synthesizer. Using an endless delay system between the two open reels, i listened, layered, cut and pasted the tapes over time. Playing them out loud on the built-in speakers Tapecorder created a new type of texture, from combinations of the ice cold temperatures heated only by the room gas heater, reused tapes, and the decayed quality of the old speakers. After mixing and processing the tapes with microphone and contact microphone recordings of the ice, snow, and sub frequencies of the wind, the cracking and crunching sounds, both high and deep, seemed to appear naturally in the tape. The sub bass widened, and the mid range became thin and fragile.For more than two years the recordings remained untouched, until recently, now in Tokyo, they were mastered, and recorded to new tapes. The affects of the cold, the sudden sunsets through the snow, and the night winds still stay in my mind, like a soundtrack to those two months, not without their own songs of loneliness but with also beauty, sounds seeming like a siren, embracing every unchangeable and otherwise forgetful moment, even in the bitter winter. “  Will Long, October 2012.