Night's Moisture by Coppice Halifax

TENTH ANNIVERSARY COPY 2024:

It's now been a decade since I completed this surrealistic monolith while sleep deprived in my Botany Bay loft studio in the subtropics of Columbia. At the time, I'd envisioned a composition that was designed to accompany a night of sleep - specifically, the almost six hours a night that my wife and I could finally rely on our daughter sleeping consistently through in January of '14. Parenthood was incredibly exhausting, and "Night's Moisture" as a tired celebration of some much needed rest every evening. This basic idea is reflected in the choice of "womb-like" rhythmic forms that resemble slow heartbeats, the filtered out drowsy chords that come and go, and the incorporation of field recordings from the very same backyard shed that is photographed on the cover. For the occasion of the tenth anniversary reissue, I've updated the disc face and sticker design on the physical edition a bit, and thanks to the changes in Bandcamp's file size limitations, I am finally able to offer the full five and one-half hour recording without any breaks in the runtime, as a single file. Additionally, "Night's Moisture" has been reduced to a "nice price" (night's price?) with more affordable digital and physical editions, hopefully bringing a humid night of Halifaxian dreaming to a new audience that may not have been around for it the first time.

ORIGINAL COPY 2014:

Like several longform Halifaxian pieces before it, Night's Moisture is an experiment in depth and immersion. Taking cues from Winter Blurring, Verdant Overgrowth and the recent wallpaper piece Aeriformic Forests, Night's Moisture clocks in at just under six hours long - a megalith in the Halifaxian woods. Designed to be a seamless non-repeating listening experience for sleeping to, it slowly but dutifully moves through different phases instead of being a static piece. Loops of different lengths overlap in new places every time they recur, much like Eno's original plans for certain types of ambient music, giving Moisture an organically growing and shifting feel, despite the repetitions. Processed field recordings of my backyard at night, as well as delicate layers of white noise and textural room sounds form the backdrop behind the orchestral compost that the elongated chords and tonalities emerge from. Womblike rhythms with nearly no treble, which resemble a human heartbeat at times, burble in and out of the stereo field, occasionally bumping into each other, and a stately but effective two-note bassline appears in places to anchor the piece from complete endless drift and to give some of the melodic parts resolution. Night's Moisture is a massive sonic sculpture, made for comfortable listening through either waking or sleeping mind states, and compatible with both headphones and larger scale stereo systems.

Night's Moisture is available as a digital download, or packaged with a CD-R that contains a special composite 80-minute mix of the piece, exclusively for the physical format. Also, following sometime soon will be a separate release of more techno/less ambient versions/mixes of the material.

Tracklist

1.	Night's Moisture	338:12

Credits

released February 5, 2014

W/P by Coppice Halifax. Recorded at Botany Bay, January 2014. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Text and photography by Brian. This is Milieu Music number ABX26. (C) + (P) Oscillog ASCAP 2014 + 2024. All nights preserved.

License