new album from MORE EAZE, “Staring At A Statue of Paint” (KSE #383)

MORE  EAZE

“Staring At A Statue of Paint” (KSE #383, CDR album), released 1/23/2018

$8 postpaid in the USA (see below for foreign rates/terms)

We at KSE are proud to have worked with MORE EAZE (aka Marcus Maurice Rubio) for a number of years now on a number of projects, going back to his college years back here in his hometown of San Antonio (he’s since lived in L.A. and now in Austin). I knew what stuff he was made of when I first saw him live as a solo act maybe 9 years ago, and he was on the bill of experimental music artists at a small gallery on S. Flores. There was a massive and brutal thunderstorm which caused the power to go out, and it didn’t come back. The other acts were all hemming and hawing and not knowing what to do. More Eaze stepped up to the plate, announced that the battery in his laptop would be good for an hour or two of performance, someone lit a candle, and he did his entire performance by candlelight on the laptop from his battery power. Since then, he’s faced an infinite number of performance situations and has worked with hundreds of the important artists in the contemporary experimental music world (he’s not the sort of guy who drops names, so I won’t….but google him for yourself!), all across Texas and the Midwest, as well as back East and on the West Coast.

I have always especially valued his work and his thought as a composer, and KSE has offered to provide him a canvas on which to try out and document his compositional ideas, and those sonic canvases have been the MORE EAZE albums we’ve released (and the earlier ones under his given name). We believe in supporting contemporary composers and giving them an outlet for their work, as modest and low-budget as out platform is. It’s all about the music–expensive packaging does not help the music out one iota. That line of Frank Zappa paraphrasing Edgard Varese, which I heard in my youth, has always stayed with me and animates what we do at KSE: “The present day composers refuse to die.” With a mind like his, and a grounding in the visual arts and literature (he understands the organizational and structural workings of a Gertrude Stein or a Cy Twombly as well as he does the history of music composition, from the Baroque age on), MORE EAZE provides us with dense and fascinating compositional layers and structures on each KSE album, and I have had years of joy and intellectual analytical workouts from all of them. And let’s not forget that on his albums for many other labels, he has worked in an incredible number of other styles, in the various murky fields of post-rock and avant-pop and skewed-and-decomposing songcraft. It’s no surprise that has been labelled the Van Dyke Parks of the contemporary underground.

Well, so much for the ballyhoo…

On this new creation, STARING AT A STATUE OF PAINT, More Eaze intentionally works with a limited palette, creating a suite of five pieces with a kind of pure and astringent feel, and I as listener find myself focusing on the patterns, the way I would with ragtime, or Bach, or the 60’s/70’s minimalists. Here’s the composer’s own comments on the pieces:

“I wanted to record a set of pieces that used very simple musical material and that I could essentially design generative (mostly) modular patches for a largely hands off approach. I was also very interesting in making something very minimal that only involved 2-5 sounds happening at a given time and these pieces reflect that. Each track is centered around the A-major-pentatonic scale and adds or subtracts notes from this simple and recognizable scale each time. These processes were chosen very much with the intention of creating something warm, light, and recognizable while also involving randomness in a way that allows for constantly developing patterns and loops that build an inviting chaos. “

As usual, it’s TOTALLY different from More Eaze’s other KSE releases…and in a different universe for the albums he does for other labels (no one I know of is so adept at changing his spots to suit the situation, while still being totally himself!). You can put it on, set the player on repeat, and just travel with–and inside–the music. I’ve done that a number of times, as I was working on getting the albums duplicated, working on the cover, printing and cutting the covers, etc., ALWAYS with this album at full volume in the room with me.

Get your copy now….see ordering information below….

TWO PREVIOUS MORE EAZE RECORDINGS STILL AVAILABLE FROM KSE (the older ones are all out of print, alas), so you can order them along with the new one:

KSE #355 (CDR), MORE EAZE, “wOrk”

KSE #370, “KSE 11th ANNIVERSARY ALBUM” featuring newly recorded, exclusive tracks from members of the KSE family and friends: JEN HILL, VANESSA ROSSETTO, ERNESTO DIAZ-INFANTE, LISA CAMERON, BRIAN RURYK, FOSSILS, MORE EAZE, JOHN BELL, MASSIMO MAGEE, MATTHEW REVERT, STEVE FLATO

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NOTE: ALL CDR’s  ARE NOW PRICED @ $8.00, postpaid in the USA (see below for ordering info, via paypal).

(OUTSIDE THE USA , one album is $18.00 postpaid, first two albums are $20.00 postpaid, then $8 each postpaid after that—sorry, but it now costs almost $14 US to send one CDR overseas….you save A LOT by buying more than one—in fact, the price on an order of two or more HAS GONE DOWN! The two albums for $20 deal makes each item only $10 each, and if you were to buy 4 for $36, they’d only be $8 each, THE SAME AS THE US COST! Anyone who is looking at this page and interested in contemporary forward-thinking music could surely find four albums you need to have! Many of our releases have been reviewed at Vital Weekly (not this one yet, obviously!), so you can check out the reviews there…or read the write-ups here on the blog.

1 album= $18, 2 albums= $20, 3 albums= $28, etc. Thanks for your understanding of this. The Post Office now charges $14.50 to mail ONE cdr without a jewel box to Europe or Asia!)

Payment is via paypal, using the e-mail address   django5722(at)yahoo(dot)com   . It might be helpful for you to also shoot me an e-mail telling me you’ve sent funds and what items you want…or if you prefer, tell me what books/cdr’s you want, and I’ll send you a paypal invoice.

OTHER ALBUMS ALSO AVAILABLE:

KSE #394 (CDR), XTERIP (Lisa Cameron/Robert Horton/Raub Roy/Lee Ann Cameron) , “The Frisbee Sessions”

KSE #390 (CDR), MATT KREFTING, “Microchips” 

KSE #385 (CDR), TOM CREAN, “3 Heads Tame”

KSE #379 (CDR), SHANGHAI QUINTET (featuring Alfred 23 Harth), “ShangShan/Stone Age Music” (Harth and young Chinese musicians, recorded live in Shanghai, China, October 2016)

KSE #371 (CDR), SAMUEL DUNSCOMBE & TIM OLIVE, “Zanshi”

KSE #377 (CDR) JOHN BELL (new for July 2017), ‘Cambridge Surprise Minor and other peals’….new compositions for percussion from Bell, well-known for his collaborations with Alfred 23 Harth….

KSE #373 (CDR), DANE ROUSAY, “Anatomize” (new for July 2017), solo percussion from the San Antonio-based composer and multi-instrumentalist

KSE #375 (CDR), MASSIMO MAGEE & JAMES L. MALONE, “The Limits Of The Possible” (new for July 2017)… one of .KSE’s most acclaimed artists,  saxophonist-composer-theorist Massimo Magee is back with a blistering duo album with guitarist James L. Malone

KSE #381 (CDR), BILL SHUTE, “Bridge On The Bayou: Bill Shute Reads the Arnaudville Poems”….readings of the five poems composed in Louisiana in 2016, soon to be published in one book-length volume

KSE #372, ERNESTO DIAZ-INFANTE, “Manitas” solo classical guitar

KSE #369, A. F. JONES, “FOUR DOT THREE TO ONE”

KSE #362, FOSSILS & BILL SHUTE, “Florida Nocturne Revisited”….new interpretations of Shute’s Florida Nocturne Poems

KSE #370, “KSE 11th ANNIVERSARY ALBUM” featuring newly recorded, exclusive tracks from members of the KSE family and friends: JEN HILL, VANESSA ROSSETTO, ERNESTO DIAZ-INFANTE, LISA CAMERON, BRIAN RURYK, FOSSILS, MORE EAZE, JOHN BELL, MASSIMO MAGEE, MATTHEW REVERT, STEVE FLATO

KSE #355 (CDR), MORE EAZE, “wOrk”

KSE #357 (CDR) SMOKEY EMERY / VENISON WHIRLED, “turning into”

KSE #363 (CDR) ALFRED 23 HARTH’s BERLIN ENSEMBLES

KSE #359 (CDR), TOM CREAN & MATT ROBIDOUX, “Blank Space”–cover art by Jennifer Baron

KSE #336 (CDR), ALFRED 23 HARTH, “Kepler 452b Edition”

KSE #351 (CDR), MASSIMO MAGEE, “Music In 3 Spaces”

KSE #350 (CDR) ANTHONY GUERRA / BILL SHUTE, “Subtraction” KSE  reissue of album originally released in 2011 on Black Petal Records, Australia 

KSE #335 (CDR album), REVEREND RAYMOND BRANCH, “Rainbow Gospel Hour…On The Air!”—a wonderful hour-long AM-radio broadcast, mastered from cassette, capturing the warmth and joy of Rev. Branch in both music (lots of it) and spoken message

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