Arc Light Editions, the reissue label curated by The Wire‘s Jennifer Lucy Allan, have announced the details of their second release, following last year’s first ever vinyl pressing of Arthur Russell’s Another Thought album. Released on 12th April, it will be a vinyl reissue of American composer Ingram Marshall’s 1984 release Fog Tropes/Gradual Requiem, originally released through Foster Reed’s New Albion label and not repressed on vinyl since. The two pieces it gathers, 1981’s Fog Tropes and 1980’s Gradual Requiem, are among Marshall’s best-known, drawing together environmental field recordings, brass instruments and voice into extended, exquisitely slow-to-unfold musical movements. You can listen to clips from its six tracks via the embed below.
Originally from New York, Ingram Marshall studied with Morton Subotnick at Cal Arts in the 1970s. He became known in the 1970s and 1980s for his electroacoustic compositions, which incorporated tape manipulation and synthesis, and drew influence from traditions including US minimalism and Balinese gamelan. Both Fog Tropes and Gradual Requiem, for example, involve live brass players alongside electronics, environmental recordings of San Francisco Bay foghorns (in the former), tape loops and the gambuh, a Balinese flute. The former is a single ten-minute long piece, while the latter is split into five parts, and is conducted by John Adams. The press text accompanying the release quotes Adams as describing the music as "the antithesis of the human voice against the vast becalmed presence of the natural world".
