Thom Nguyen – The Summer Passed in Monotone LP

Please Note: This item is a Pre-Order! Expected to ship Mid-June 2023

The fourth release from Ceremony of Seasons. The music accompaniment to VISUALS Wine’s Ritual of Senses Wine Club package – released to the world on the Summer Solstice of 2023. With this release we have celebrated a full cycle. All four seasons have had their initial ceremony. Summer brings both full blooms of life and dark, brooding thunderstorms, It’s all here.

Specifically written and recorded by Them Nguyen to be paired with Reach Out Like Tendrils, a California grown, native yeast fermented Pinot Noir wine.

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It dawns slowly here in Appalachia, summer’s persistent pulse, that seething solidity of buzzing insects, flowers bursting into wilt, animals waking and returning in preparation to leave and sleep again. It’s the peak and the decline, the sun’s summit and sinking, the heat blast of day and the cool pall of night. There never seems to be quite enough time. Summer begs us to hold onto it, to be asked to stay, even in its heat and the incessant light, to allow it to continuously unfold, to let it become endless.

Though you may know Thom Nguyen from frenetic drum improvisations with MANAS and other projects, even a quick scan through his catalogue reveals the vastness of his range across a variety of instruments. Here he works in synthesis, mixing evolving texture with pulsing sequences. The two sidelong tracks don’t build so much as drift, each layer like so many mushrooms breaking groundcover in their season until they crumble back into the soil. Filters open into blossom and close again into the mix’s depths. Drones burrow out of the earth and buzz into life, leaving behind shells of their passage as they exit. Sequences sing into the landscape, strange birds, and silence again as dusk falls. Nguyen uses the full length of both sides of the 12” to create vast environments that vibrate with synthetic life. But as with organic nature, those organisms all eventually decay, waxing and waning like July’s Buck moon.

Within The Summer Passed In Monotone is the full radiance of the summer sun, but night falls even in the brightest months. This fourth release for Ceremony of Seasons, rounding out our inaugural year, encircles a theme across all of this year’s offerings: ephemerality. Everything passes away into time, and music marks its passage, like a clock, a calendar, a ritual. But a record is a spiral, not a circle; it begins and ends. And like all the others, this one finishes with the listener not quite ready to let go, clinging to this mirage of summer as if more sound might prevent the end. Time passes, we spiral with it. All seasons fade, but though this release marks the close of the first year for CoS, time moves ever forward, and there is yet much more to come.