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Steve Bates
All The Things That Happen

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    Listen to Steve Bates' All The Things That Happen artist mix
     

    Get an annual Bandcamp Digital Subscription to receive this album in the format of your choice, along with several releases from 2022/2023; every release we will do for the next twelve months; a standing 25% discount on all LPs and CDs across the entire 25-year Constellation catalogue; and several subscriber-only exclusives (most available in the file format of your choice).

     

    CST167   180gLP • CD • DL

    Release date: 23 September 2022

    Duration: 38:38

     

    Shop Indie:
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    Streaming Links:
    Apple Music 
    Spotify

     

    “Steve Bates has created a nightmarish sonic universe (no different than our current global situation), one which will challenge and trip you up. Recommended for those who revel in the fuzz and drink in the palpable noises before succumbing to its siren song. Also recommended for fans of Tim Hecker.” - Echoes And Dust

    As the warm tones fade you are left to reflect on All The Things That Happen and the narrative that has shaped its often extraordinary soundscape. The unstable, destructive cacophony, the tender passages of calm, echoes of the threat of power and the fragility of something more innocent. On his debut album Steve Bates is making a statement, asking the questions but also suggesting the answers and that is some achievement.” - Backseat Mafia
    “Moments that blend calmness and intensity feel right: like finding calm in a busy place.” - Boolin Tunes

    Musician and sound/video installation artist Steve Bates presents a striking solo ambient/noise album of melodic smear, radiostatic blur, panoramic noise clouds and dissolving tones. Made primarily with the self-imposed limitation of a Casio SK-1, All The Things That Happen showcases the more deliberate, intensive, maximalist side of Bates' wide-ranging sonic aesthetic and practice. An isolation record (like so many), it combines an ineffable melancholy with claustrophobic tension and simmering political rage. Constructed from layers of glistening distortion-drenched melody, pulsing and droning oscillation, bursts of blown-out chords, sweeps of static and sheets of crackling hiss, Bates has made a dynamic, ardent, iridescent noise album of impressive depth and underlying devastation. 

    "This was supposed to be an ambient record; quiet, minimal and sad. These tracks all started off that way but I kept reaching for more texture and noise. Somehow the noisier the record got, the less sad it was also. I was listening to, and loving, a lot of music by Andrew Chalk and I had finished a year-long run of listening to Eno’s Ambient 1 and Ambient 4. I prefer On Land to Music for Airports although I love both. On Land just has a darkness and uncertainty that appeals to me. Adding more noise also got me excited about ways this material could be played live even though it also felt like that could never happen again. In 2022, I opened for Godspeed You! Black Emperor in Saskatoon to give it a try and was pleasantly pleased to hear it all live and loud."

     A fixture of Winnipeg's burgeoning anarcho-punk and social justice community in the 80s-90s, Bates played in hardcore and indie rock bands (XOXO, Bulletproof Nothing) while contemporaneously continuing to fiddle obsessively with the shortwave radio his father bought him as a child — sensibilities that continue to meld and inform his sound work to this day. Bates founded the Send + Receive Festival in 1998, a crucial development in putting Winnipeg on the map for avant music and experimental sound art, which he helmed for seven years. Moving to Tiohti:áke/Montréal in 2005 he took on the Sound Coordinator position at Hexagram (Concordia University), released solo and duo work on ORAL_records and two albums with his Black Seas Ensemble on The Dim Coast, while pursuing myriad other ongoing audio research, installation and collaborative projects. His exhibition and site-specific works have been presented throughout North America and Europe, Chile and Senegal.

    Bates relocated to Treaty 6/Saskatoon in the fall of 2019, a return to the Canadian Prairies just before pandemic that also profoundly shaped the solitary, immersive, assiduous practice that yielded All The Things That Happen: his most purposive, powerful, purely ‘recorded’ work.

    Thanks for listening.

      

    PACKAGING NOTES

    Deluxe 180gram vinyl pressed at Optimal (DE) comes in 350gsm Arktika jacket + 300gsm Arktika inner both printed matte LE UV. Includes DL card. Artwork + texts by Steve Bates.

    CD comes in a custom mini-gatefold jacket printed on uncoated 20pt paperboard + inner dust sleeve for the disc. Artwork + texts by Steve Bates.


    CREDITS

    Made mostly with a Casio SK-1 + computer, electronics, effects.

    Recorded and mixed at Reflected Light over by Massey Park, Treaty 6/Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
    Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi near Milan.

    The organ on “September through September” was recorded in Valparaiso, Chile, on a Hammond Stage II Rhythm at José Pérez de Arce and Francisca Pastor’s place on Galos near Plaza San Luis. This track is dedicated to Victor Jara.

    Images by SB. Design by Ian Ilavsky and SB.

    Thank you/danke/grazie/gracias/hvala/merci:
    jake moore, Sadie, Ari, Addie, Bookla, Giuseppe Ielasi, Timothy Herzog, Marc-Alexandre Reinhardt, Joshua Bonnetta, Chad Munson, Douglas Moffat, Velibor Božovic, Theodore Turner, Greg MacPherson, Michaela Grill, José and Francisca, Eric Mattson, Don & Ian & Ziad and all at Constellation.

    We acknowledge the support of FACTOR, the Government of Canada, and Canada’s private radio broadcasters.
    Nous reconnaissons l’appui de FACTOR, le gouvernement du Canada et les radiodiffuseurs privés du Canada.