Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Purchasable with gift card
$7USD or more
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
Black vinyl EP of Slabs Vol I with double sided color Xerox cover
Includes unlimited streaming of Slabs Vol I
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
ships out within 10 days
edition of 100
$15USDor more
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
Gray marble with gold splatter Vinyl EP of Slabs Vol I with double sided color Xerox cover
Includes unlimited streaming of Slabs Vol I
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
ships out within 10 days
edition of 100
$20USDor more
Ultra limited "flipped cover" version of Gavilán Rayna Russom - Slabs Vol I 12" vinyl EP
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
Limited to only 7 copies this special edition of Slabs Vol I has a monochrome cover and a color insert (as opposed to the original version which has a color cover and monochrome insert). These are marbled grey and with gold splatter vinyl and each one is hand labeled and numbered by Rayna.
Includes unlimited streaming of Slabs Vol I
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Incessant low frequencies, layers of processed room noise, pulses of synthesized tones, a voice subsumed in textural harmonics, a violin stretching across rivulets of hiss… To listen to Slabs Vol I is to stand in a room full of ghosts all talking at the same time. This makes sense considering that much of Gavilán Rayna Russom’s recent writing has discussed the connections between her mediumship practice and her creative work as a composer, producer, and DJ. Elements of club sounds are present, but overt signifiers like kick drums and looping melodies are not. It’s as if a raging dance party with a DJ entrancing a peak hour crowd exists somewhere, in another room or another time, nearby enough to hear and feel, yet also distant. Perhaps the most notable feature of the four tracks on Slabs Vol I is their extreme density and the way that the sounds of the spaces they were recorded in becomes a primary element of their musicality. Engaging with each of these pieces is like being clothed in sound as a physical material, perhaps for a ceremonial occasion, rite of passage or moment of deep introspection.
In a 2021 interview with Madison Bloom for Pitchfork, Russom described Slabs Vol I as “the achievement of a production goal I’ve had for a long time of creating these really dense slabs of sound that are also a kind of a deconstructed dance music… like this physical embodied sense of big glaciers of sound crushing against each other.” The description is apt. Slabs reckons with the long arc of Rayna’s creative output, especially her work as Child in the early to mid 90’s, which was either shared in listening sessions with close friends or occasionally via small run home-dubbed cassettes with xeroxed covers that she distributed through her “ended before it began” early DIY label venture Sole Productions. Just as Sole Productions held the nascent seed of what would eventually become Voluminous Arts, Rayna’s work as Child holds much of the latent and exploratory sonic language that forms her current creative vocabulary. Slabs Vol I makes this more explicit than ever.
Only a tiny amount of the Child recordings have seen a more widespread release (notably on Trevorshaus’ Familars Vol I compilation and Voluminous Arts’ own archival release of RFNAL). Some unreleased Child recordings were also layered into tracks on Rayna’s 2019 album The Envoy and 2020’s Secret Passage. The tracks on Slabs Vol I follow suit (with an occasional shred from the Child project embedded amongst their dense layers), but the primary source material for these four pieces is a set of recordings Rayna made in the chapel of St. Paul’s Church in Los Sures of Williamsburg, Brooklyn in early 2017. The relationship between this EP and the Child recordings is one between moments in time whose distance in terms of numerical years is outweighed, and troubled, by the proximity of their poetic concerns, movements and discoveries and the way those become tangible through their conversational interplay.
credits
released March 29, 2022
Written, recorded and produced by Gavilán Rayna Russom
Mastered by Russell E.L. Butler
The French producer's debut makes an ideal chillout soundtrack, its synth jams swirling with Balearic textures and hypnotic trip-hop beats. Bandcamp New & Notable Apr 21, 2024
