ale{atori}c

I have been playing music pretty much constantly since I was 19 years old, for much of that with the droney outfit Chef Menteur, but—surprisingly—this is my first solo album.

The Echoing Labyrinth is a collection of songs I recorded a few years ago, when the pandemic was still fresh, and many of us had spent a great deal of quality time alone, whether to our delight or horror, or in my case both. 

I was asked to play an art gallery opening and came up with some ambient guitar material that would suit the occasion. In doing so, I was able to tap back into into some of the loop-based, harmonically structured techniques that had been a key part of my guitar sound in early Chef Menteur and had been lying somewhat dormant in recent times.

Living in New Orleans, many have said, brings about a visceral appreciation of the symbiotic (or co-parasitic) relationships of beauty and decay, life and corruption, joy and despair. It’s with a similar mindset of emerging from the pandemic but also acknowledging the permament loss that many of us felt, losing loved ones, jobs, opportunities  as if we literally lost years of our life to a black hole—and yet despite this many found new solace in contemplative and  meditative space.

The sound here may not have quite consciously aligned with any of that, but the repetition and decay of memory is literally part of my technique: by using technology to emulate the loss of fidelity when sound is recorded and played back on tape or drum head, it is as if the sound is just perceptibly slipping away from us like our memories distorting and fading. 

Sitting in our octagon-shaped 1910 living room with 2 small Vox guitar amps on either side of me, I recorded live to a stereo microphone in the middle of the room. Some edits and processing were added later to deepen the effect of the intent.

I only recently rediscovered this unreleased album after being approached at a Chef Menteur gig by a friend who is a fan who said they really dug my solo guitar work from the past, and this reminded me I had recorded some tracks. I was surprised to find that I had not only finished an album, but I had named the songs and mastered them. The only thing that was missing was the artist name, which was probably the hold-up. After trying out a few hundred possibilities, I settled on les nuages, having taken far too many photographs of clouds, being a fan of Django Reinhardt, and the somewhat humorous combination of nu+age.

Of course, right now is a totally different moment in our rapidly changing world, and one that demands we face many of the brutal and disturbing events head-on and with clarity while we still can. However, our mental health still demands that we take some time apart from that, and both playing and listening to music can be an excellent tonic.

Thank you for listening. I hope that as ambient music, your ears find it exactly as pleasant and as interesting as you need it to be in the moment. Please let me know if you have anyone you want to share this with, especially that would like to review it (or better yet runs an ambient music label!)–I’m more than happy to share download codes.

Alec Vance

New Orleans, March 28, 2025

Bandcamp link

this is a simple west-african/carribbean sounding blues riff on the 12-string acoustic that seemed to suit the lovely spring weather we were having in new orleans a recent saturday afternoon.

listen also for: the sound of a distant train and christy petting marlowe.

The Guild is tuned to open G, I believe.

#9 Hopping Over Shadows (5:24, 7.4MB mp3)

Four tracks: (1) 12-string acoustic guitar, (2) sine wave drone*, (3) tabla, (4) rhodes electric piano through electro-harmonix hog.

you will recognize this as a revisiting of (although re-recorded from scratch) and developing upon idea no. 1, “12-string open G rag #2.”

* for the drone i used the rather simple “potpie simulator” max patch (v4), which you will read more about later.

The first thing of the week is something I’ve been working on with my 12-string acoustic guitar. It’s the second of three recorded (so far) demo improvisations in a series I’ve done in an open G tuning. I plan to develop it as my technique improves:

After a half-lifetime of guitar, I only recently got decent at fingerpicking, after watching some free banjo lessons online and applying what I learned there to guitar as well as watching an instructional video by Doc Watson. Also, I’ve got a dusty old Takoma LP that I’ve listened to quite a bit in the past year with John Fahey, Leo Kotke and Peter Lang that connected with my endless background/fascination with old-time Appalachian music; other recent favorite listens are records by Sir Richard Bishop (“Polytheistic Fragments”) and Daniel Higgs, and as always Jack Rose and Pelt.