HALLOCK HILL - THE UNION / A HEM OF EVENING (2LP - USED m-/m-)

"Named one of the ten best solo acoustic guitar albums of the year by The Out Door and a top ten album of the year by The Liminal, Tom Lecky's debut album as Hallock Hill elicited a powerful response when it was first released on CD by Hundred Acre Recordings last May. The album's unique assembly of stacked and layered acoustic, electric and lap steel guitars delivered a new kind of studio improvisation: pieces that were spontaneously made, yet feel composed, pieces that glide from harmonious to dissonant in the instances where their improvisations swerve around one another and occasionally collide. MIE Music brings The Union to vinyl for the first time as a double LP, paired with Hallock Hill's new album A Hem of Evening: six interlocking acoustic pieces that extend the structural themes of The Union's central acoustic tracks. Lecky again builds a range of overlapping improvisations and twisted melodic weavings, but here within a more naked and spare atmosphere. Where some of the tracks on The Union were structured by continually stacking great density of sound and involutions, the tracks on A Hem of Evening work with a different geometry. Air and space: expansion of themselves within themselves, rather than an expansion coming from additional voices. In the words of Fluid Radio's Andy Gillham, A Hem of Evening shows "a canny ability to build meaningful musical structure from free-form composition." A book of prose poems and photographs based on these pieces accompanies the LP." (label info)