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• 'Noctuary' CD

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  Noctuary: a record of what passes in the night; a nightly journal
  
  This album is a collection of original pieces for eight-string guitar that evoke nighttime imagery. The majority of the music was written during the earliest hours of the morning, or ‘witching hour’ during long bouts of insomnia. This was a tumultuous chapter of my life, marked by disappointment, sleeplessness, anxiety, and a lack of inner purpose. These quiet nighttime hours became a routine escape from reality, and I would often find myself in a trancelike state, simply watching my hands while they improvised the music that is now this album.
  
  A conflict between light and dark is the focal point of this album; at times the music is bleak and unforgiving, and at others it is uplifting and hopeful, representing the various emotional states that one may experience during the course of a night. The overall arc of this album is cinematic in nature, using recurring motifs to portray specific emotions or characters. I imagined the eight-string guitar a sort of mini-orchestra, exploiting the extended range to create unusual sounds and textures. I incorporated a wide range of demanding techniques, including rapid arpeggio sequences, tremolo, fast scale runs, and dense chordal textures in order to demonstrate the full potential of the instrument and adequately challenge myself as a guitarist and composer. Although separated into fourteen distinct movements, Noctuary is intended to be heard as one complete work.
  
  The musical style of this album is heavily informed by the aesthetic of electronic music, particularly that of Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin. I've transcribed a considerable amount of his music for guitar, as featured on my 2021 EP Aphex Twin for Guitar, and absorbed elements of his musical language into my own writing. Several of these pieces are quite repetitive in form, evoking the "looping" effect commonly utilized by composers of ambient and electronic music. The influence of other electronic artists such as Boards of Canada and Nine Inch Nails, neo-classical minimalist composers such as Philip Glass and Nils Frahm, 20th-century composers such as Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Liszt, and Scriabin, and jazz composers such as Miles Davis, Pat Metheny, Ralph Towner, and Brad Mehldau must also be acknowledged.
  
  released November 17, 2023
  
  All works composed & performed by Simon Farintosh.
  Recorded & produced by Drew Henderson.
  Guitar by Jeff Sigurdson.
  Album art by Meer Mahmoud.
  
  all rights reserved
  
  Includes unlimited streaming of Noctuary via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. ... more
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