Curious Music is pleased to announce the release of Green Cone, the debut album by composer and visual artist Amanda Berlind. The DL is available now with a CD and limited-edition CD/Comic Book.

The CD/comic bundle is strictly limited to 50 copies and is expected to sell out quickly. Order yours today!

Rich, idiosyncratic, and resolutely lo-fi, Green Cone radiates an infectious, quirky warmth. Berlind’s love of the natural world­­–plant and animal–manifests itself in a kind of synesthesia, layered into complex, repetitive shapes. Cascading livingroom piano, bird song, indistinct atmospheres and charmingly unfussy wordless vocals take the listener on a journey that feels extraordinarily personal, like eavesdropping on someone humming through the interlocking motifs of a Steve Reich composition. Berlind’s formidable academic resume has surely brought a conceptual heft to her compositions, even as she happily jettisons any thoughts of formailty or pretention¬–opting instead for something infinitely more intimate and meaningful. Berlind approaches the composition process visually, accumulating auditory shapes and then carving those shapes of sound into a musical picture. The video album and comic book that accompany Green Cone cement the connection, and are clearly integral to her artistic vision.

The DL- and CD-only bonus track “Bird Chart”, an amplified sextet performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, gently pricks the self-contained serenity of most of Green Cone with the infectiously loping, off-kilter combination of the group’s instruments punctuated by Berlind’s delightful tapes of birds and harmonica. With its cheerful 60s exotica vibe, the track closes the proceedings as they opened - with a robust namaste to the natural world.

Berlind cites the key influences of Lunz (the collaboration of Curious Music artists Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Tim Story), the onomatopoeia of Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier and Mary Hansen’s layered vocals, along with the psychedelia of Brian Blomerth’s graphic novel Bicycle Day. However, Berlind describes her primary inspiration as aiming “to investigate, imitate and manipulate sonic textures from the natural world as an exploration of the space that surrounds me.”

Berlind has also created an accompanying Green Cone video album in collaboration with visual artist Ethan Barretto. Their videos combine drawing, video, and animation into a somewhat absurdist, psychedelic stream of kaleidoscopically-shifting shapes that interlock in visual correspondence with the pulses and shifts of the music.