Hangedup & Tony Conrad
Transit Of Venus

A meeting of the legendary violin minimalist and one of the past decade's finest instrumental punk bands. Tony Conrad needs no introduction, having made crucial contributions to avant-garde experimental film and sound since the 1960s. Hangedup – the Montréal duo of Eric Craven and Gen Heistek – released three searing albums of steam-engine percussion and layered, distorted, dive-bombing viola on Constellation in the early 2000s.

Conrad and Hangedup first met in 2003 at the k-raa-k festival in Belgium, which led to a series of shared concerts and collaborations in 2004 and a pile of live-in-the-studio recordings captured while the trio were working up various pieces and improvisations. These tapes rock. Having gone unreleased at the time, Craven together with Harris Newman at Greymarket Mastering recently plunged back into the archives and started shaping an album from the various 2-track and live-mixed multi-track source material.

Transit Of Venus documents this fertile collaboration and includes some enormous slabs of drone rock alongside more decomposed pieces and gorgeously gritty string duos. 

 

The Musique Fragile Volume 02 box set 3x180gLP vinyl edition is a silkscreen print extravanganza. Each album comes in its own 2-3 colour screenprinted jacket accompanied by a screenprinted poster, and the three albums are contained in a 2-colour screenprinted slipbox hand-made from thick 100% recycled chipboard.

Please see Musique Fragile Vol. 02 for packaging components when this album is purchased as part of the 3-album Musique Fragile set. 

Tony Conrad: Amplified violin, monochord, bowed drum skins
Genevieve Heistek: Viola, violin, loops
Eric Craven: Drums, skateboard, sheet metal

1, 2, 3 & 5 recorded live to 24-track analog tape
4 & 6 recorded live to 2-track DAT

All recorded/mixed by Efrim Menuck at the Old Hotel2Tango, Montréal, 2004.
Except 3 mixed by Eric Craven and Harris Newman at Greymarket.
Mastered by Harris Newman at Greymarket.

Big thanks to Harris Newman for making time to help Eric sort out all the options.
Another big thanks to Mark Molnar for attentive listening and making observations that were very helpful.
Special thanks to Mike Beard for bearing witness to all of the live collaborations with Tony and for always being open for creative collaboration.
Thanks to Don and Ian for making a home for these recordings.