entry codes |cs180

Well, I'm not sure if this album has some hallucinogenic properties, but while listening Entry Codes through headphones in drowsiness I dreamt about flying over Charing Cross Road during an imaginary contest of Gnawa trance music bands. I definitively should avoid snoozing while listening to such releases as I could commit many valuational errors and saying for instance the unconventional rhythmical codes Bryan Day and Jay Kreimer - the two eccentric craftsmen (an acceptation to the point as they just use some homemade instruments in their sets) - have recorded could be good to enter into a somewhat deviated oniric world, but I should say they activated some auditory remembrances as their rhythmical structure maybe have some points of intersection with Morrocan or Nubyan trance musical tradition with the remarkable difference that they use totally different sonorous objects, while sound in such an amazing way you could envisage the possibility to send some home stuff you don't need anymore to their mail account instead of collecting it in the bins for recyclable materials! If you decide to approach to Seeded Plain's acoustic devilments, I warmly reccomend to dwell upon tone-colour strange and estranging sounds Jay and Bryan manages to obtain by striking and so giving life to their noisy freaks so that the hums and all those rasping noises in Tarpaper Neutrality, the muted tolls and metallic squekings in Vacuum Insert, the metallic garglings and the sinister snoring together with somewhat stunned strokes of hit box-springs in Ciar of Thumbs and Waxwing Lattice as well as the dull wooden rumbling interrupted by a teeming of metallic bumps and plops could be considered as the whimpering of creatures born inside an audio-genetical mad lab! Vito Camarretta (Chain DLK)

What surprise to find Bryan Day (proprietor of underground labels Public Eyesore and eh?) on a Creative Sources release! Seeded Plain is an experimental/improvised freak folk duo also featuring Jay Hreimer. Both musicians play home-made instruments. Entry Codes features five tracks in a little over 40 minutes. Chaotic and inspired music that would almost sound psychedelic if it weren’t for the total lack of incense-like scents. Gamelan from a faraway forest, the music animals conscious that they must scare off humans before it is too late. François Couture (Monsieur Délire)

Cette réalisation de Bryan Day et Jay Kreimer est issue d’un travail effectué avec des instruments créés par les deux artistes. Comme je ne sais que peu de choses de ces deux musiciens américains, je situe leur activité dans un domaine s’étendant pour les références de John Cage (œuvres pour percussion) par certaines couleurs, à Roger Turner (pour d’autres nuances) et Jean Dubuffet (pour le hasard et le jeu). Métallique, parfois résonnant avec tuyaux et gamelles, parfois pas, lorsqu’il s’agit de ce qui s’apparente à des cordes. Un bouillonnement sonore dynamique nous accompagne d’un bout à l’autre de cet enregistrement. Une basse-cour de tubes et autres ferrailles. Très plaisant. Dino (Revue & Corrigée)

Seeded Plain consists of two musicians, Bryan Day and Jay Kreimer, who are based in Lincoln, Nebraska and who play homemade instruments. That may tell you almost nothing about the music they play and the CD comes without liner notes or instrument details - just a list of evocative titles like “tarpaper neutrality”, “vacuum insert” and “kneaded gum eraser” and a photograph of some of their instruments, which is mysterious at best. It sets the stage for hearing a CD that is almost wholly unpredictable.
Day and Kreimer’s instruments frequently fall into the generic category of percussion - there are resonant metallic objects, whether gong, cymbal or xylophone-like and scraped materials (wood perhaps?) - as well as occasional bowed strings. There are compound clicks and glassy elisions, but there is nothing to suggest that either musician has a kind of specialization or that there is any boundary between one ‘kit’ and another. The music has a sonic kinship with the strings and percussion of Harry Partch, but unlike Partch’s music, there’s no rigorous tonal system evident or an insistent fidelity to a written score. Day and Kreimer seem instead to be preoccupied with the absolute presence and possibility of the material touched and the resultant sound and its extension.
Listen long enough and closely enough and you may begin to feel yourself entering the very substance of a sound, sensing the space between one device and another, even the weight of the original air. It’s a worthwhile investigation of time and material, each reduced to its absolute sonic identity, divorced from the definitive intrusion of the visual, whether that might mean the identity of the instrument or the performer or the evident interaction of the musicians. Stuart Broomer (The New York City Jazz Record)