The National & Augustines members join Ceiling Spirits for 'The Bloodwren'
Ceiling Spirits collaboration flies with The National and Augustines members on board, landing with new album and lead track…
FALTER
Progressive orchestral opus directed by the vision of musician, Mario Quadracci loops in Brian Devendorf, Eric Sanderson and others
Advocating slow listening, The Bloodwren arrives in a lavish tech-savvy-by-vinylphile presentation, including Dolby Atmos immersive experience
Ceiling Spirits – Falter – Out Now
The Bloodwren Album Released June 2024
Ltd. Edition Vinyl / Standard & Atmos Digital
https://ceilingspirits.tmstor.es
Intense, complex, cataclysmic and burning sounds churn through close to an hour of swirling, progressive composition as the Ceiling Spirits project – led by enigmatic Milwaukee musician, Mario Quadracci – brings musical friends together, including The National’s Brian Devendorf and Augustines’ Eric Sanderson. Preceding the release of a new, five-track album, The Bloodwren, in various audiophile formats this spring, the LP’s theatrical curtain-raiser, Falter, is revealed as a heart-quickening signpost to the road ahead.
Non-sequentially considered as an essential middle point of the entire Bloodwren plot, Falter’s sense of fast/slow and push/pull sonics are custom built to be evocative of cracked human complexity. It stands as a carefully calculated, sonic story of welcome retreat from a darkening world by looking momentarily inward, before being faced by the chastening vision of an altogether more threatening, self-defeating darkness within endless consciousness. Produced this time by Peter Katis’ (The National, Interpol, Jonsi), The Bloodwren follows up Ceiling Spirits’ 2018, self-titled debut.
Quadracci says of Falter’s development: “The album is composed as if the music were accompanying a film. ‘Falter’ in particular is written like a film score with every second of music corresponding to a detailed script. The music uses various repeating patterns of different lengths to create textures that are simultaneously lulling and unnerving.”
Alongside the warm welcome for Devendorf on drums and Sanderson picking up double bass and synth duties, Katis, Quadracci and the Ceiling Spirits collaboration also brought on board players from notable albums by Regina Spektor, Mountain Goats (Yoed Nir - Violins, Cello, and Viola), Field Report (Devin Drobka - Drums and Celeste) and John Cale (Rob Schwimmer - Piano, Theramin, Haken Continuum). That musical acumen floats the intricacies of the Ceiling Spirits vision of an elaborate, escapist and filmic world on a plain of pin-sharp performance.
The first signs of something new from Quadracci emerged at the turn of 2024 with the release of The Bloodwren Pt. II, a soothing, string and piano meditation which Quadracci described as one of “conflicting moods, melded into something incoherent and inescapable.”
Unmistakeably, unapologetically and indefinably rich in orchestration, creativity and borderless scope, Quadracci’s tone of instrumental post/progressive-rock fell initially from the table of influences such as Pink Floyd and Godspeed You! Black Emperor as he worked towards what Ceiling Spirits has become today. Increasingly preoccupied by lived trials and troubles scrolling the news agenda, whether the pandemic or electioneering politicians, Quadracci challenges listeners to pick up on signs of subtle divergence in his sound this time around, saying: “There's a reason I dipped my toe into metal a bit on this record.”
A student of Berklee College of Music, indulging equally in the virtuoso and collaborative spirit, the composer is credited entirely with The Bloodwren’s gossamer framework of arrangements and compositions, playing guitars, adding synths and delivering programming himself. Having quickly learned to read music after stepping onto the path of technical music education, every note of Ceiling Spirits’ sounds is painstakingly rehearsed on paper, written between both city (more kinetic, rhythmic work) and rural (expansive, harmonic sounds) locations, before entering the studio.
Prioritising vision over conventional format, a full-length album of five songs advocates for a slowed down listening experience far beyond conformity. With tracks extending over the quarter-of-an-hour mark, plus a specially produced, immersive Dolby Atmos mix (completed by multi-Grammy-Award-winning engineer and producer Dave Way) leading the range of digital formats, The Bloodwren’s otherworld bleeds decisively into that of the listener. The full track listing for the album is as follows:
1. Falter (8m, 23s)
2. The Bloodwren (16m, 15s)
3. A Slide (3m, 11s)
4. Platonic Forms (13m, 43s)
5. Oscillopsia In Oblivion (8m, 10s)
Ceiling Spirits first began as an experiment in live film scoring where Quadracci would perform solo, utilising extensive looping, effects and non-traditional guitar techniques to create dense atmospheric soundscapes behind self-produced films pieced together from found footage. The project expanded to include other musicians, including a string ensemble to flesh out the material born from the live shows but decidedly more compositionally constrained to suit an LP. The Ceiling Spirits’ debut album was recorded in London and Ireland, produced by Gareth Jones, whose credits include work on Depeche Mode and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds albums, and mixed at Abbey Road.
For up-to-date information on all Ceiling Spirits releases, connect with the project online at:
https://twitter.com/ceilingspirits
https://www.instagram.com/ceilingspirits
https://www.facebook.com/p/Ceiling-Spirits-100063533802240
