Land in the Sky

Alfredo Thiermann (ex miembro de Föllakzoid) viaja con sus composiciones de piano a través de diferentes lugares en compañía de las guitarras de Tres Warren (Psychic Ills), álbum de 4 piezas lleno de ambiente, meditación y emociones diversas

"Land in the Sky” is an album by architect Alfredo Thiermann (formerly of Föllakzoid) and musician Tres Warren (Psychic Ills). It is the result of an extended sonic conversation between them that developed over the course of two years while both resided in different parts of the world. It is a friendship with a strong emphasis on sonic exchanges rather than other forms of communication. It was recorded in each of their domestic spaces and studios in Santiago de Chile and New York City - separate from one another and sent via email.

The music came together without prior discussion of direction. Tres recalls: “Alfredo sent me some songs and asked me to play on them. He planted the seed, but he didn’t say much. I think he might have mentioned slide guitar which I was playing a lot of at that time. I was entranced by Bruce Langhorne’s music from the Western film ‘The Hired Hand’ and to me, this was an opportunity to explore something similar to that. A formless type of music, but one that is rooted in an early American tradition. I began playing freeform patterns over his piano but soon enough the sounds begin to intertwine. Even though we weren’t in the same space making this together, a strong feeling began to come through regardless.”

Alfredo remembers: “I was entering a new place in my life. I was leaving my band, Föllkazoid; having my first son Pedro Tristán, and starting my architectural practice. I was trying to figure out a way to keep producing music and relate it to my interests as an architect. I’ve always been after a kind of space between the virtual and the actual. I thought that the repetitive and pattern-based piano songs that I was making at home could be understood as a kind of space —with its rhythms, its clear geometry, and its atmosphere. Then I decided to invite Tres —with whom I had toured the US a couple of months prior— to join this “space” and have a kind of conversation through it. We ended up building this together.”

The four 10-minute long tracks are the traces of their exchange of various emotional and mental states. They are prolonged and repetitive meditations composed by simple shapes and forms that almost act as a primitive language. “Land in the Sky” is a sonic correspondence, an experiment bridging continental distances, an intangible and immaterial space, the space of music. Similarly intangible, the cover of the album is a contribution by the photographer James Welling, known for his photo on the cover of Sonic Youth’s ‘Bad Moon Rising.’