Ventifacts, by Ventifacts

Ventifacts

by Ventifacts

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Ansel__knight Always love musick and art coming out of Brattleboro VT but this really spun my head around, love the crazy atonal indie folk vibes! Bought a CD, can’t wait to hear it on my car speakers!
Favorite track: Azimuth of Sunrise.

JP Rossi Strange and beautiful collection of songs. It's both experimental and a surprisingly easy listening, with stories and all sorts of exhilarating melodies taking you along their waves. All ears should try this fresh sound! Favorite track: The Ballad of Hearst & Herriman.

Bruce Hamilton One of the most compelling releases of 2021.

Stephen Weigel A bustling, rich acoustic landscape that constantly subverts narrative expectations, but in a completely natural manner. Very glad Ben and Damon came together for this one; the result is compelling and epic. I've already spun it three times!!! Favorite track: Groaning Under the Evidence.

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	Pacific 00:00 / 04:47

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1.	Azimuth of Sunrise 04:02	lyrics	buy track
Snapping a green branch from a dead tree to find the juice of memory. Snapping a green branch from a dead tree to find the juice of memory while the pigments of the present soak the blotter of your history. From a flyspeck in the year dot, a fiber through the fabric. From a flyspeck in the year dot, a needle through the cloth. Where once there was no passage now there is a swath. Only singing, no question. Only color, no eyes. Then the hinging, the cardinal, azimuth of sunrise. Snapping a green branch from a dead tree to find the juice of memory. Snapping a green branch from a dead tree to find the juice of memory. At the moment there is nothing, a bright red bird breaks free.
2.	Pacific 04:47	lyrics	buy track
I. Can you speak or will you demur again, wondering, as you cough that long martyr’s itch from your throat and spit it, humbly enough, to the verge if this habit of treading lightly is a monk’s or a cowards, if your soft, patient sidesteps sleepwalk quietly towards Calvary or pass like miracle kernels, undigested through the system. There! Ocean winds blast this bright little garret room. Salt water chugs behind a smooth, dry freeway with its throat swelled and sputtering to the new moon a good righteous mess like God loves. II. Spring tide You feel the high water in your stomach, the exuberant obscene froth taking to the air in soapy clouds as she drives her gaze calmly through the open casement— She is tracing upper lines in the architecture downtown, calculating.
3.	Bonneville 06:01	lyrics	buy track
On the road again and dreaming of the cellar at Oak St. All the heavyweights are there quaffing highballs out of chipping tumblers, maudlin as mangled silverware, barefoot ancestors milling round that monstrous furnace, everyone of them an angel or a clown. Everyone of them has maimed his feet on shards of broken glass; not one among them dares look down. Crossed the flats after Salt Lake, hypnotized by the road last night. A frigid hotel room near Bonneville, sleeping in the shallows of the chase lights. Polycarbonate crescent moon gamboling across the state line awake before the sun, cold breakfast on the run, goodbye— Flee to the hills, don’t turn around trust the charisma of the mountain: Pilot peak, biting the dawn, screams You’re wider than a wound, more than a monument, and loftier than a pillar of salt. but I stole a glance—you can still see the track where death came nipping at the Donner party’s back and I just don’t know—I feel so exposed like the pulpit’s open to me but the book is closed. Lightning flash from the interior, intestines tangled in a rage, Jack-in-the-box hoodoos on the canyon walls, migraines coiled in the sage. It was so achingly quiet when I ran out of gas at sundown that my heart began to weep and the future fell asleep for now.
4.	Rest 04:49	lyrics	buy track
Under the clear bell of weariness, Too heavy to scuttle from the walls with the crumb-seekers, I’ll sink into the sick, sweet lead which holds all love, whole but frozen, in timeless foreclosure, and I’ll find, somewhere in the house —soon, now, in this exact light— your first glance tripping a chord through my nerves. If I couldn’t feel your lamp burning, I don’t know how I could ever rest. If I couldn’t rest, I wouldn’t wake to find your lamp burning, and know how it is, nesting in the eaves, I come to rest.
5.	Virga 02:13		buy track
6.	The Ballad of Hearst & Herriman 05:12	lyrics
THE BALLAD OF HEARST & HERRIMAN Hearst and Herriman stand on a stone lip casing Coconino, shadowless at noon. It’s an image that returns when the sun rejoins the city towards the flower moon. Hearst says: Oh! It’s so vast and so strange, the lunar silence of that southern range. I cannot read it by the light of day. I don’t even see it until I step away. But if I view it from a lesser height, I can embody it in black and white. No one knows what we’re looking at, so why not spin a little gold from that. And Herriman says: Don’t look down. Don’t look down. And Hearst says: You furnish the balloon heart, I’ll furnish the brick. I need something to strike at; I’m feeling a little sick. We’re not learning to read here, we’re not learning to write. We’re learning to be fearless. We’re learning to fight. We don’t wait for fear to crush every last implement we’ve painstakingly gathered—they’re not heaven-sent. We don’t wake in dread to the reporting of shots, we wake to read a table spread with bricks of thought. [Herriman:] Don’t look down! And Hearst says: Looking down is easy! It’s looking across that makes me dizzy like I’m on the sauce. Oh, but I am awake, and wakefulness is hard! It is a luxury you can’t know if you never leave the brickyard. And Herriman says: Wakefulness is a snow drift on the horns of the moon. Anyone can look up, but you have to look up.
7.	Hidden Well 06:14	lyrics	buy track
You're hidden well sunk down, earthbound without a handbook to decode I know I only try to float You're hidden well The grass hid the way in; I fell Saw just too late Mistake Distance in this space is changing Well-hidden And I reach down I reach down How did you drop so deep? You're hidden well You stretch for miles It's surely overspill You're no sugar pill But you soften Similarly slippery You didn't want to be found You didn't want to be But we're here now
8.	Engine 01:28	lyrics	buy track
In the afternoon, the silver drone of turbines from a spent, dripping sky, the trained fingers of sleep pinching out the wicks one by one until, in the black earth, the old girl turns over.
9.	Groaning Under the Evidence 04:49	lyrics	buy track
On a slipper of purple velvet, I castled and spent the morning in the tower where straight lines are sovereign and the king is safely impotent. In the winter sun, grasping at proportions, geometry of fields: aspect, distance. (I only wanted to talk to you about life and death) Mineral smell of cold illuminating the transom over a locked door, no harm, no foul. I only wanted to talk to you about life and death. Messy, messy early stages of cooking at twenty-eight, Mind spluttering like oil under imagined meat. There are lies you can tell yourself for years and no one lets you know. But you get there.
10.	It's Such A Long Time Ago Now 04:18	lyrics	buy track
While I’ve still got steady fingers, going to suture up the past. While I’ve still got steady fingers, going to suture up the past. Going to use a finer needle: maybe this time it will last. Going to catch my lover’s laughter, tie it on and thread it through, and if I cannot raise her laughter, a strand of hair will do. I know this is a fiction. That don’t make it untrue. Going to ask her to be watchful as the night ticks by. I can feel my chest constricting and a hood obscure the sky. One pull: let’s go home now. No pulls: let me lie.
11.	Dog Day Music 07:32	lyrics	buy track
i. Syrupy breeze in this country of heat, nodding banks of trees, clouds massing up from nowhere like my ballooning edge this afternoon —forgive me, but shut up. I have no plan. Let the serried changes of the afternoon march right over these fields of light— I can’t see a single spot of earth for the weeds. ii. Without music there is no story. Cottonwood leaves shimmer even in this dead heat, like the breath under thought. Someone is always winning. To believe is to forget. iii. Quiet music an IV drip of the most potent serum leafing out the lonely afternoon. It burnt itself clean, this flecked sky, thunderless in the end, who would have guessed it, and I’m dressed in black, like a fool. That helicopter— I hope they have air conditioning. And what the hell are they up to up there?

about

A ventifact is an object, often a stone, sculpted over the course of eons by the wind.

Ventifacts is a songwriting collaboration between two inveterate bandleaders from the West Coast art rock scene, Ben Spees of the xenharmonic trio The Mercury Tree and Damon Waitkus of the avant-folk quintet Jack O’ The Clock. The project grew out of a mutual admiration and a burning curiosity about what a fusion of these two projects’ equally distinctive but quite disparate styles could possibly sound like.

Like The Mercury Tree, Ventifacts makes extensive use of microtonal instruments and tunings, creating colorful, deeply layered recordings that employ a wide range of instruments both familiar and strange, and feature guest appearances by members of both parent bands. At heart, this is a deeply emotional music, devoted to melody, narrative, and the thrill of the unexpected. Under the pandemic’s hothouse conditions, Ben and Damon have been feverishly pinging recordings back and forth between Oregon and Vermont for two years, and this weirdly joyous album is what came out of it.

credits

released September 22, 2021

Ben Spees - vocals, electric guitar and bass guitars (10-, 17-, and 24-EDO), acoustic guitar (17-edo), keyboards, percussion

Damon Waitkus - vocals, hammer dulcimer, baritone and piccolo electric guitars, acoustic guitars (12- and 17-EDO), guzheng, flute, percussion, electric taishogoto, psaltery

Connor Reilly - drums

Oliver Campbell - bass on tracks 9 and 11

Emily Packard - violin, viola

All words by Damon Waitkus except "Hidden Well" by Ben Spees

Recorded & mixed by Ben Spees & Damon Waitkus
Mastered by Myles Boisen

themercurytree.bandcamp.com
jackotheclock.bandcamp.com

TUNINGS:
Azimuth of Sunrise: 24-edo
Pacific: 24-edo
Bonneville: 24-edo
Rest: 24-edo
Virga: free pitch
The Ballad of Hearst & Herriman: 10-edo
Hidden Well: 10-edo & 20-edo
Engine: 17-edo
Groaning Under The Evidence: 17-edo
It's Such A Long Time Ago Now: 24-edo
Dog Day Music: 24-edo

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about

Ventifacts Brattleboro, Vermont

Ventifacts is a microtonal songwriting duo comprised of Ben Spees (of The Mercury Tree) and Damon Waitkus (of Jack O' The Clock). This bicoastal collaboration has been developing since late 2019, and released a full-length album in September 2021.

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