A Number Of Small Things/Artists/Orcas products

Benoît Pioulard - Fir EP 4,99 €

Benoit Pioulard - Temper / Precis 16,99 €

Temper is the second album under his Benoit Pioulard nom de guerre. Composed throughout a year that involved graduation from university and a cross-continental relocation, its 16 tracks arose in specific periods of intense creative energy.
Assembling various analog sources on basic software at home, Pioulard has honed his craft into a form that suggests something far grander. With soft-edged vocals and a broad palette of instruments that lately includes harmonium and cello, he constructs diverse arrangements that skirt the borders of pop with beautiful, detailed atmospheres. The scope and sonic narratives of songs like "A Woolgathering Exodus" and "Golden Grin" exhibit new degrees of musicality, while the weightlessness of "Brown Bess" or "Sweep Generator" reflects the unrestrained context in which the record was produced.
It is no coincidence that the word 'temper' has more than 20 definitions related to basic existential aspects like emotion, behavior, and music; it offers many dimensions but also reveals how scrawny language can be in its attempt to name the abstract. On Temper, Pioulard endeavors to make sense of things in a tumultuous time, inspired by everything from medieval astrology to the poems of T.S. Eliot and the films of the Italian neo-realists. Fully aware of the mission's vanity, he is nevertheless consumed by its path.
Benoit Pioulard's first album was the widely acclaimed Precis which was listed on literally dozens of 2006 year end best of lists.

The double LP vinyl version of this release also includes the Precis album, issued on vinyl for the first time.

Benoit Pioulard - Lasted 14,99 €

Lasted is the third album by Thomas Meluch under the alias Benoit Pioulard. Thomas has toured throughout North America and Europe since his last record, the process of which has had a marked impact on the development of these songs as lyrics and structures have been scrapped, tweaked and reworked in the live setting. As with previous albums it was recorded and mixed in domestic isolation, this time throughout the rainy season in his current home of Portland, Oregon.
While the extent of the dreary climate's influence on the results is left to the listener's discretion, what is certain is that Thomas has a preternatural ability to weave disparate sound components into a cohesive sonic tapestry, mixing a varied palette of field recordings and percussive elements along with melancholy melodies to create songs that recall - and are akin to - vespers of long-buried memories.

Rafael Anton Irisarri - Reverie 12,99 €

This is the 2nd edition of Reverie, pressed on high quality BLACK virgin vinyl at RTI limited to 450 copies for the world. Included is a free MP3 download coupon.

Immune is proud to announce the release of Reverie, a brand new mini-LP release from Seattle based Rafael Anton Irisarri. These are the first new recordings from Irisarri since the Hopes and Past Desires 7” EP released in early 2009.

Reverie features two brand new compositions, “Lit A Dawn” and “Embraced” on Side A and an amazing side-long interpretation of the Arvo Pärt classic “Für Alina” on Side B. Irisarri has long been a student and listener of Arvo Pärt’s approach to composition and has always been profoundly inspired by Part’s tintinnabuli style. While working on a special “Day of the Dead” performance last year for the Seattle Art Museum Irisarri decided to perform some Arvo Pärt pieces with pianist Kelly Wise. While Wise performed “Fur Alina” on piano, Irisarri took some liberties with the piece and added new arrangements for drone guitar and electronics. The performance inspired Irisarri to return to his home studio and create new compositions to accompany the “Für Alina” piece. Reverie features piano, drone, electronics, and bowed/treated guitar. Irisarri began experimenting with guitar bowing techniques on the Hopes and Past Desires release and continues the approach here.

Irisarri will follow the release of Reverie with other releases on Miasmah and Room40. He also continues work on his Ghostly International project The Sight Below and has recently recorded with Goldmund for an upcoming release of Erik Satie pieces.

Orcas - Orcas from 13,99 €

Vinyl edition includes a free download of the album + digital bonus tracks! You can choose from colored (clear) vinyl and black vinyl! The clear vinyl edition is limited to 300 copies worldwide!

The courtship of ambient music and traditional songform has been a long and tenuous one, almost to the point that their differences seem irreconcilable. Spanning decades with only a few points of obscure intersections, the occasions on which the two styles have met and crossed into the pop culture lexicon have often yielded a contrary, oil-and-water form. The abstract nature of the “ambient” genre and instant gratification of the “pop” song require deft hands for successful cohabitation, thus it’s little wonder that there are so few practitioners of its delicate equilibrium.
Orcas – comprised of haze-pop auteur Benoît Pioulard and post-minimalist composer Rafael Anton Irisarri – is an imaginative return to that narrative. Theirs is a style deeply rooted in personal variations on songform and ambient craft, and as a duo they bridge the furthest outlying aspects of their previous solo work published on Kranky, Touch, Miasmah, Room40, and Ghostly International. Here song and abstraction become one entity, condensing the spaces between to generate an arching trajectory. This co-mingling of contrasts is even coded into their moniker; Pioulard and Irisarri have chosen an iconic symbol of the American Pacific Northwest, a methodical sea hunter that is also a totem of the open oceans' expanse. The so-called “wolf of the seas” that evokes a quiet, stately, yet powerful nature.
Appropriately, their music is a careful balance of chiaroscuro elements, where pop hook and spatial ambience converge. In its environs, lyricism flows as a time-distended dynamic, rising and falling, proceeding almost antithetically to pop's typical gratification ethos.
Orcas has taken an immersive, fluid vector for their passions; a resonant call like sonar from the depths.

Benoit Honore Pioulard - Plays Thelma 12,99 €

Thelma is best described as a place existing in between—a lake within a haze. Against its concave mirror, the sonic territory of Benoit Honore Pioulard—documented across three acclaimed LPs by Chicago's Kranky label—assumes the qualities of this place and all its ephemera, warm breezes, burbling shimmers and avian circlers. During his excursions to Thelma, Pioulard rested beneath the willow and wandered in the meadow, listening, absorbing, and recording. Glimpses are contained herein, where the solace and beauty of this mysterious place resonate in travelers who care to listen.

Recorded at home throughout spring and summer 2011 with guitar, harmonium, voice, magnetic tape, bowed bells, cello, warnophone, and music box.

Benoit Pioulard - Precis 14,99 €

Precis is the first album from Thomas Meluch under his musical pseudonym Benoit Pioulard. Following a series of limited, handmade cassette and CDR releases for friends and family over the last several years, and the well-received Enge EP (Moodgadget 2005), Precis arose as a documentation of a coming to terms with impermanence, marked by analog residue and the imperfections of human influence.

A multi-instrumentalist with an insatiable palette, Pioulard bases most of his songs on treated acoustic guitars and honeyed vocals, backed by carefully layered bells, bass, dulcimer, old tape samples, field recordings and myriad other sources. These sounds, though sculpted roughly into pop songs, have their own delicate patterns of ebb and flow, distortion and disappearance. From the sunny refrain of "Triggering Back" to the descent of nighttime chills on "Needle & Thread", Precis sighs in time with the seasons. It's an album about him, her, and you; it's an exaltation of the ways these things end.

Benoit Pioulard - Temper 14,99 €

Temper is the second album under his Benoit Pioulard nom de guerre. Composed throughout a year that involved graduation from university and a cross-continental relocation, its 16 tracks arose in specific periods of intense creative energy.

Assembling various analog sources on basic software at home, Pioulard has honed his craft into a form that suggests something far grander. With soft-edged vocals and a broad palette of instruments that lately includes harmonium and cello, he constructs diverse arrangements that skirt the borders of pop with beautiful, detailed atmospheres. The scope and sonic narratives of songs like "A Woolgathering Exodus" and "Golden Grin" exhibit new degrees of musicality, while the weightlessness of "Brown Bess" or "Sweep Generator" reflects the unrestrained context in which the record was produced.

It is no coincidence that the word 'temper' has more than 20 definitions related to basic existential aspects like emotion, behavior, and music; it offers many dimensions but also reveals how scrawny language can be in its attempt to name the abstract. On Temper, Pioulard endeavors to make sense of things in a tumultuous time, inspired by everything from medieval astrology to the poems of T.S. Eliot and the films of the Italian neo-realists. Fully aware of the mission's vanity, he is nevertheless consumed by its path.