Aquarius said of There Is No Word Tender Enough To Be Your Name upon release:
This is a special musical valentine from aQ pal Dan Valor, aka Clarinette, to all the aQ customers out there (actually it's to his wife, but he decided to share it with us, and you!). This Valentine's Day release is only available from us, and only as long as this single batch lasts (a single batch of just 18 COPIES!), which we're guessing won't be long. And you should definitely not sleep on this, cuz it's a doozy. Not necessarily romantic in the traditional sense, but we're guessing this heaving slab of lush layered drones would be a lot more exciting than a bunch of chalky candy hearts, the first track here, mixed live on WFMU, finds Vallor taking what has to be his thickest and darkest piece yet, originally on his cd-r Nul, and recontextualizing this swirling psychedelic tangle, near metallic in places, but shot through with multiple melodies, a murky expanse of blackened shimmer that should have all you aQ dronelords in heaven. Nearly sixteen minutes of undulating low end, and constantly shifting longform tones, the overlapping sounds producing all manner of pulses and pulsations, giving the sound a sort of spectral momentum, that is utterly entrancing. Then about nine minutes in, the voice of Gertrude Stein surfaces, drifting atop the churning drones, delivering her spoken valentine to her friend, the writer Sherwood Anderson, the perfect valentine, celebrating a strange and unlikely friendship, as all the best friendships are. The voice soon fades, leaving the drone to play out to the end, augmented for the last few minutes by the sounds of machinery, a gorgeous mechanized dreamdrone collage.
The second track seems to harken back to Vallor's recent piano tribute to DNA, delivering a sonic valentine to his true love in the form of "Crepuscule With Shannon", a gorgeous stretch of abstract piano, wreathed in reverb, flurries of notes, billowing above more subtle melodic constructs, haunting, and elegiac, minor key, wistful and yeah, kinda romantic.
Clarinette began making tapes for broadcast on KPFA's "Assassinatin' Rhythm" in the mid-80's, in time the project went
dormant until some tapes were found in 1999. One of those tapes made it to Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore who asked to release an LP. Tapes from those early years along with newly recorded material were released in 2002 as Haze. Clarinette has been an active recording project since....more
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