Lodge by Ex-Easter Island Head

"Lodge" was recorded a few days before we left our shared home and rehearsal space – Croxteth Lodge – a former nursing home in Liverpool, UK. Home to the group for seven years and with some fifty-odd other residents coming and going through that time, the Lodge was where we conceived and developed all of the groups' material 2009-2016.

Forgoing the groups' usual rhythmic minimalism on percussion and mallet struck guitars for a weightless orbit around two low-register harmonium chords, upright piano and radio guitar, Lodge was improvised in a single take.

The house was empty and bare with our instruments being moved out the following morning:
the familiar acoustic of the space changed with the absence of furniture and people. It was an afternoon in August in the UK, so naturally it was raining. The rain leaked through the roof into the room in a steady drip whilst we played.

Benjamin Fair played harmonium – this particular one over a hundred years old, sobbing with slow air-leaks, frame juddering with every bass note. Jonathan Hering slept on the couch and was woken up to play the piano which can be heard audibly shedding components as he summons a lyrical, rolling cascade; aptly pitched between nursing home recital and the-party-is-most-definitely-over melancholy.

I play several 'Radio Guitars' – horizontally-laid guitars with vibration speakers (transducers which turn flat surfaces into amplifiers) placed on the guitar body. FM/AM radio static is played through the speakers which vibrate the body of the guitar, exciting the strings tuned in sympathy with the harmonium and creating clouds of glowing, luminous overtones. PVC pipes tuned to the harmonium by cutting to different lengths protruded from the windows into the garden with microphones placed inside, forming a simple tuned acoustic filter of external sounds and rainfall.

We were privileged to have a home, to have had homes and to have other homes after.

Many millions of people do not have that privilege.

All proceeds from this release will be donated to Shelter, a charity helping those facing homelessness and housing issues in the UK

- Benjamin D. Duvall, Liverpool, September 2020

https://england.shelter.org.uk

UK-based quartet composing and performing music for Prepared Electric Guitar, Percussion + other instruments

Mechanical preparations and extended techniques // group interplay and melodic invention through purposely limited means

"Churning pulses, alternate tunings
and dense harmonic worlds...all the strings being heard at once"
- New York Times

"Free flowing genius" - Guardian

exeasterislandhead.com
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