Eric Barnett

about

Barnett's self-produced album was recorded, mixed and mastered in one marathon week in January. Barnett plays all the instruments, including acoustic and electric guitars, lap steel guitar and prepared piano. There is also considerable manipulation of the recorded sounds to create spacious, atmospheric sound stages. The album is broken into two parts, the first having four sections, the second having three. The first part starts with a single low, tolling note and gradually builds by the addition of one or two notes at a time, a metaphorical creation of the world out of a void. But once a world is created, it needs life. In the second section, Barnett begins coalescing the wide-flung, laid-back sounds into coherent chords and fragments of melody. The first chord to break away from the drone which underlies the entire first section is quiet, but so significant in contrast to what has come before, it seems to be like the very touch of life into what had been inanimate matter. The brief third section brings full melodic arcs, cradling phrases with the warm touch of folk music about them. The ambient atmosphere still hovers in the background, but only as a backdrop to the flowering growth of melody in the foreground. The fourth and final section of "Part 1" is more experimental, building from the same harmonic basis as the previous section, but here featuring complex layers of backward-looped instruments and feedback. It drifts up on ecstatic, glimmering threads of feedbac

albums

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You & Me Bak to '69 - Rare Skinhead Reggae

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Parts (Disc 1)

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Gas Greatest Hits (Pama ECO4)

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Parts (Disc 2)

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Pama Reggae Hits '69

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Ska Ska Ska From Jamaica

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Music for a Picture of a Painting

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Parts (Disc 3)

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Reggae Hits 69 (vol 1)

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Reggae For Days (Pama ECO34)

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Skinheads on the Dancefloor, Vol. 8 - Reggae Hit the Town

Parts