John Lithium

A very interesting recording, this album is (to my knowledge) the only studio recording of The Spires of Oxford. The solo side-project of the late Jason DiEmilio (by suicide), he was better known through his psychedelic/experimental group The Azusa Plane, which released several highly regarded works of multi-track guitar drone compositions, with elements of dark ambient and noise appearing now and again. However, The Spires Of Oxford is instead a heavily multi-tracked and echoing series of seemingly random Fender guitar passages. Honestly, it is somewhat unsettling to listen to the entire track all of the way through (it is twenty-seven minutes of improvisation, after all). The passages seem to purposefully clash with one another, and just when it seems that you are enjoying a certain segment, another totally different movement brusquely arrives to negate the previous one (whilst the other is slowly fading off into the distance). This track is also interesting in that the website in which I discovered it from (Epitonic.com), also suffered from a rather untimely demise (although I believe it is still possible to download the track from Epitonic). So, as long as you do not mind seemingly aimless and wandering guitar improvisation (or actively enjoy it from time to time), The Spires Of Oxford is an interesting document of days which shall never return.

P.S. Tried to find information on the Jason DiEmilio run label “Colorful Clouds For Acoustics”, but it appears that only a Discogs page exists, so I have included that as well. There is also tracks of his main group The Azusa Plane on the Epitonic site, which are also long compositions, but there the sonic palette is much broader, ranging from fragile and delicate to rumbling moodiness.

—

The Spires Of Oxford (Epitonic)
The Azusa Plane (Wikipedia)
Pitchfork Article
Colorful Clouds For Acoustics (Discogs)

~ by John Lithium on June 16, 2007.

Posted in acoustic guitar, ambient, Music For The Rest Of Us Archive