Long-form work of duo James Rushford and crys cole. Thick with the past and an uneasy shuffling about in the present, listening to Ora Clementi is both peaceful and unsettling - sort of like being alone in the cinema. Subliminal narratives speak from just behind the curtain and melodies whistle momentarily through the forgotten pipe organ. Stay till the end credits and you might just cry.
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Tracklisting:
1. 1.16.16 - 33:21
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Recorded by James Dunn. Mixed by James Dunn. Mastered by James Dunn. Original photo by Bradley Buehrin.
Available as 320k MP3 or 24bit FLAC
Ora Clementi is the duo of Canadian sound artist crys cole and Australian composer/performer James Rushford. Distinct, disorienting and highly performative, their work examines voice and vocal mirroring through preconscious speech processes and the codified abstraction of found texts, supported by a vast battery of handmade instruments, electronics and hyper-colour processing. Their second full-length release Sylva Sylvarum (2021) draws its title and various textual elements from literary descriptions of utopias, while weaving together an eclectic selection of instruments and sounds that draw the listener into a magnificent, surreal and otherworldly space.
Previous performances include MONA FOMA Festival (Launceston), FOCUS GRM Festival (Paris), Issue Project Room (NYC), Sounds Like Festival (Saskatoon), M-hotel Festival (Bergamo), Q02 (Brussels), Café Oto (London) and Constellation (Chacago).
'Sylva Sylvanum feels imbued with an almost spiritual resonance. Folding real-world sounds into a landscape of dreams, this album holds your attention even when it confuses.' - Pitchfork
' ... an absolute triumph that reached toward the furthest possible heights of contemporary electroacoustic practice and vocal experimentalism.' - Soundohm
'Ora Clementi, the duo of crys cole and James Rushford, are architects, in a way, constructing a sonic Neverland from a synthetic mosaic of lucid digital ephemera and vocal hypnosis.' - Foxy Digitalis
crys cole is a Canadian sound artist working in composition, improvised performance and sound installation. Generating subtle and imperfect sounds through haptic gestures and seemingly mundane materials, she creates textural works that continuously retune the ear.
cole has ongoing collaborations with James Rushford (AU) (as Ora Clementi) and Oren Ambarchi (AU) and has worked recently with Francis Plagne (AU), Leif Elggren (SW), Tetuzi Akiyama (JP), David Rosenboom (US), Keith Rowe (UK), Seiji Morimoto (JP/DE), Jessika Kenney (US), Tim Olive (JP/CA) and many more. Her work has been published by Black Truffle (AU), Penultimate Press (UK), Ultra Eczema (BE), caduc. (CA), Bocian (PL), Another Timbre (UK) and Infrequency editions (CA/DE). She has performed and exhibited her work worldwide.
James Rushford is an Australian composer-performer, whose work draws from concrète, improvised, avant-garde and collagist musical languages, staking out an idiosyncratic stylistic space that has been described as ‘electro-acoustic experimentation with a beating heart’ (Boomkat) and ‘haunted Jacobean ASMR’ (The Wire). Investigating the creases, cracks, and folds in traditions ranging from early music to new age, Rushford’s work subtly exaggerates seemingly liminal aspects such as atmosphere and the bodily presence of the performer until these take on a weight equal to musical elements such as pitch, rhythm and timbre.
In recent years, Rushford’s solo work has been guided by his theorisation of sonic images, particularly the shadow, which has inspired pieces as diverse as an hour-long companion to Federico Mompou’s Música Callada (See the Welter, for solo piano, 2016) and a sumptuous translation of the play of light across flat surfaces into synthetic sound (The Lake from the Louvers, 2020). Rushford has longstanding performance practices on piano, synthesizers and electroacoustic devices, and portative organ, bringing to all of these a delicacy of touch and a harmonic sensibility in which unorthodox tunings coexist with influences from fin de siècle Impressionism, the 20th century avant-garde, and many strains of popular music.
James has created original work for BBC Scottish Symphony, Melbourne Symphony, Ensemble Neon (Oslo), Speak Percussion (Melbourne), Ensemble Vortex (Geneva), MONA FOMA, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Ultima Festival (Norway), Unsound Festival (New York), Tectonics Festival (Tel Aviv), Send and Receive Festival (Winnipeg), Adelaide Festival and Liquid Architecture (Melbourne). As well as previous projects with Klaus Lang, Annea Lockwood, David Behrman, Tashi Wada, Haroon Mirza and Dennis Cooper, he works regularly with Golden Fur (his trio with Sam Dunscombe & Judith Hamann), Joe Talia, Ora Clementi (with crys cole), Oren Ambarchi, Kassel Jaeger, Anthony Pateras, Will Guthrie, Graham Lambkin and Francis Plagne.
His music has been published by a variety of international labels including Unseen Worlds (US), Pogus (US), Penultimate Press (UK), Another Timbre (UK), Holidays (IT), Black Truffle (AUS), KYE (US) and Shelter Press (Fr).
In 2017, James completed a Doctorate from the California Institute of the Arts.
