Coppice Halifax & Variant - Slow Earth Ritual (2019)

Slow Earth Ritual is a confluence of many different tributaries, running through the Halifaxian continent. It celebrates the hundredth release in the ABX subcatalog of post-Analog Botany recordings. It revisits, in sonic and photographic terms, the winding and tangential paths of Verdant Acre. It returns to the invocation of oceanic and forestial elements in the Coppice Halifax name itself. It is the culmination of a collaborative process with a close friend, confidante and longtime influence on the CH output, Stephen Hitchell of Echospace.

With this release, Stephen and I agreed to start with the aural compost of the Verdant Acre series - a dense ambient techno monolith replete with shades of GAS, Pole, The Caretaker, Andrew Deutsch, Rod Modell and of course Hitchell himself. We met each other in the Acre, across foggy time and midwestern space, and it all felt like we'd been there before, somehow. Using his Variant vessel (which I've done two extensive remixes for in recent years) Hitchell brought the falling stars and cosmic cultivars with him to my sentimental estate. For my part, I excavated a surreal structure from deep under the black forest dirt, an Earthen temple fashioned from igneous stone, petrified wood and the bones of long perished woolly mammoths.

Together, we transfigured the past into something that is not the past, the present or the future. Music that feels familiar, yet exists outside of time, suspending itself in an endless oscillation of vibration and rhythmic pulse. Unearthing these artifacts from past explorations with Variant is both an honor and a pleasure. It is worthy work that I feel will yield fruitful listening (and potentially subsequent crops) for years to come. Hitchell has unified the ocean of (Echo)space with my deification of unmapped vaporized forestry, both of us plunging lethargic and reckless into the frontier's long night. Slow Earth Ritual canonizes his creative work as a part of my own, and returns me to my own native soil in the process.