Black Meteoric Star

DFA is thrilled to now offer releases from Voluminous Arts, the new label from Gavilán Rayna Russom, in our online store. Rayna has released a ton of music on DFA under aliases like Gavin Russom, Delia and Gavin, Black Meteoric Star and The Crystal Ark, and she's also been a member of LCD Soundsystem. She's since released music on a bunch of other labels (all of it very good!) and started Voluminous Arts in 2017.
Disco, the four Black Meteoric Star full-length, has been burning a hole in our turntable since we bought it.

Learn more about Voluminous Arts here.

Official blurb below...

Triple, multi-colored LP (LP1 is orange, LP2 is mint and LP3 is plum) with xeroxed cover. Digital download codes to be provided after purchase.

**

Voluminous Arts happily announces its third official release, a 12 track digital album and accompanying 3xLP limited 3 color vinyl edition entitled Disco by Gavilán Rayna Russom’s elusive alias Black Meteoric Star. This is not a Disco record. The title deliberately troubles the music biz’s incessant tendency to hierarchize genre classification over the experience of listening. If you must categorize these mutant sounds think of them as a proposed alternate score for those long, caffeinated sessions in Abby Sciuto’s forensics lab, the soundtrack to a heavy workout in the Westchester Danger Room or perhaps the musical accompaniment to deep body investigations of your own ancestral memories.

What this record really is, and why it’s called Disco has to do with the layering of time and life energy present in the spaces where we have traditionally danced to music which are sometimes called Discos. From the pounding urgency of “Muscle Machine” through the unbridled night vision romp that is “Fluid Feline Forms” and the shimmering investigations of “Whispers Between Worlds” to the extended lazer pointer focus of “I’m Unmelting” this record lays out a broad slab of practice-based research into the ghosts we connect with on the dance floor. Whether it be through partying in former industrial buildings, contested spaces of labor built on lands violently appropriated from indigenous people, uncomfortably inhabiting vacuums in queerness left by the AIDS epidemic, lifting lineages through sampling, or the relentless cycle of whitening that accompanies dance music’s march into the market, our experiences in the Disco have been permeated by the spectral and the haunted. Through rhythm and frequency, organized over time, this music blurs the veil between the living and the dead inviting those who move to it to connect with experiences beyond that false binary.

What you have here is another fantastic Black Meteoric Star record, as always made without multitracking or overdubbing, recorded directly from single live takes. It is is utterly consistent with all that name has come to mean, but on Disco Black Meteoric Star’s vision has been allowed to expand into an almost mythologically epic space. Ancestral time works differently. Settle in and absorb the frequencies. As the closing track suggests, the virtual Disco these sounds evoke is for “Freaks Only”.

Black Meteoric Star was written, recorded and produced by Gavin Russom between September of 2006 and December of 2008.

This CD contains the entire 12" series.

Excluding "Dawn" the tracks have been edited for album length.

The original digital transfers of tracks 1-4 were done in Berlin.

This recording was achieved using specialized electronic circuits designed and built by Gavin Russom.

Tracklist:
1) Death Tunnel
2) World Eater
3) Domination
4) Anthem
5) Dream Catcher
6) Dawn

Originally conceived as a series of 3x12" singles, the first blast of Black Meteoric Star tracks ended up coming together on a self-titled "album" in 2009. It being 2009 and all, the collection only came out digitally and on CD (?). It never got a proper vinyl release.

So, this is the next best thing: all three original BMS twelves, purchasable as a unit, at a special bundled price.

DFA is thrilled to now offer releases from Voluminous Arts, the new label from Gavilán Rayna Russom, in our online store. Rayna has released a ton of music on DFA under aliases like Gavin Russom, Delia and Gavin, Black Meteoric Star and The Crystal Ark, and she's also been a member of LCD Soundsystem. She's since released music on a bunch of other labels (all of it very good!) and started Voluminous Arts in 2017.

Learn more about Voluminous Arts here.

Official blurb on this one from Rayna herself below...

Pink vinyl with a xeroxed cover. Digital download codes to be provided after purchase.

**

"The 3 Love Songs EP comes out of a live show I did at a house party. I grew up and came of age playing shows in people's houses but hadn't done it in a while. My good friends L'Amour Bleu, a New York based band I'm a big fan of asked me to play with them at their record release party. It would have been impossible to bring my normal equipment and perform my normal Black Meteoric Star set so I decided to create something stripped down and simple that would require a minimal amount of gear. Black Meteoric Star live shows often include vocal elements that don't appear on the record, but some of those elements began to creep into more recent recordings such as "No Map" on The Xecond Xoming of Black Meteoric Star and the two poems I read on the No More White Presidents Soundtrack. This stripped down and more "punk" incarnation gave me an opportunity to formalize and expand on these vocal elements. I was just beginning to truly awaken to and accept my trans feminine identity and grasped onto the idea of a love song that, defying convention, spoke about my relationship with my inner world and the elemental forces around me rather than a cherished "other", imagined or real. After performing at the event I felt the "songs' were strong enough to record and the result was this EP. As with all Black Meteoric Star music these are live takes to cassette tape with no multitracking or editing." 

Black Meteoric Star is the latest project by longtime DFA alumni Gavin Russom. The project is inspired equal parts Euro-disco, wonky early electronic body music from America's Midwest and an always present fascination with the outer reaches of global psychedelic rock. Gavin Russom began the recordings for Black Meteoric Star sometime in 2006. It was at this time that Carl Craig remixed Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom's single "Relevee", making it one of the years biggest dance club anthems. Three vinyl 12" singles by Black Meteoric Star will be released on DFA Records with extended original versions in 2009 along with a full self-titled CD that edits and compiles all six singles. There will be an edition of 100 of each 12" hand stamped and accompanied by a series of posters also designed by Russom. These releases will follow a narrative line and the six pieces of music tell a story of clubbing and the long journey through the night and into the next day.

In this project, Russom carries his ability to create rich sonic landscapes to the dance floor using minimal but intense arrangements and high-energy repetition. The third and final chapter is "Dream Catcher / Dawn". In "Dream Catcher" it becomes clear that neither the masculine nor the feminine side can win. They have to coexist, and can, when each side acknowledges its own strengths and resolves to use them toward a mutual end. In terms of the club land metaphor this is the point in the night where people hook up. As the longest of the six tracks its story is about total surrender. For me it evokes both lovers surrendering to each other and the devotee surrendering to his God. At this moment we acknowledge that there is no way out but through. "Dawn" comes. The bass line echoes the melody of "Death Tunnel", signaling return. Although we are beginning again everything looks, sounds and feels different. We are much stronger now. As the sun comes up and edges begin to become clear again, we drive slowly through the still sleeping city. Rhode Island native Gavin Russom now lives and works in Berlin. He has produced many remixes recently, including a new single by Croatian techno artist Petar Dundov, New York's avant garde duo Palms and a remix featured on the upcoming soundtrack for the remake of the movie Tron.

Tracklist

A - Dreamcatcher

B - Dawn

DFA is thrilled to now offer releases from Voluminous Arts, the new label from Gavilán Rayna Russom, in our online store. Rayna has released a ton of music on DFA under aliases like Gavin Russom, Delia and Gavin, Black Meteoric Star and The Crystal Ark, and she's also been a member of LCD Soundsystem. She's since released music on a bunch of other labels (all of it very good!) and started Voluminous Arts in 2017.

Learn more about Voluminous Arts here.

Official blurb below...

Digital download codes to be provided after purchase.

**

Black Meteoric Star's original soundtrack for the film "No More White Presidents" unofficial cat# VOL001, the first release on Voluminous Arts. Sprawling across each 30-minute side of this cassette are tape saturated and distorted sounds from the depths of BMS’s well. Distinctions between “track” and “interlude” are blurred. Poetry emerges from surging lagoons of synthesizer sound and beats push forth from noise. 

No More White Presidents is a multi-layered abstract film by Gavilán Rayna Russom. She began the film in 2015 and after working on it gradually over two years completed it in January of 2017. It is the first formal occurrence of the “flash film” technique that now forms the central structural device of her filmmaking practice. This technique has connections to both compositional techniques such as serialism and chance operations and craft technologies such as beading, braiding and weaving. The film engages the failures of capitalism via an extended meditation on the different forms of unreconciled dead its fallout has accumulated. 

Black Meteoric Star is the latest project by longtime DFA alumni Gavin Russom. The project is inspired equal parts Euro-disco, wonky early electronic body music from America's Midwest and an always present fascination with the outer reaches of global psychedelic rock. Gavin Russom began the recordings for Black Meteoric Star sometime in 2006. It was at this time that Carl Craig remixed Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom's single "Relevee", making it one of the years biggest dance club anthems. Three vinyl 12" singles by Black Meteoric Star will be released on DFA Records with extended original versions in 2009 along with a full self-titled CD that edits and compiles all six singles. There will be an edition of 100 of each 12" hand stamped and accompanied by a series of posters also designed by Russom. These releases will follow a narrative line and the six pieces of music tell a story of clubbing and the long journey through the night and into the next day. In this project, Russom carries his ability to create rich sonic landscapes to the dance floor using minimal but intense arrangements and high-energy repetition. 

The second single "Dominatron / Anthem" takes place after midnight. The animal energy encountered in "World Eater" is released and splits itself into female and male parts. This 12" is the story of their struggle for power over one another. "Dominatron" is the feminine side and "Anthem" is the masculine side. As in a possession ritual, each side appears and does its dance. Rhode Island native Gavin Russom now lives and works in Berlin. He has produced many remixes recently, including a new single by Croatian techno artist Petar Dundov, New York's avant garde duo Palms and a remix featured on the upcoming soundtrack for the remake of the movie Tron.

Tracklist

A - Dominatron

B - Anthem

Black Meteoric Star is the latest project by longtime DFA alumni Gavin Russom. The project is inspired equal parts Euro-disco, wonky early electronic body music from America's Midwest and an always present fascination with the outer reaches of global psychedelic rock. Gavin Russom began the recordings for Black Meteoric Star sometime in 2006. It was at this time that Carl Craig remixed Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom's single "Relevee", making it one of the years biggest dance club anthems. Three vinyl 12" singles by Black Meteoric Star will be released on DFA Records with extended original versions in 2009 along with a full self-titled CD that edits and compiles all six singles. There will be an edition of 100 of each 12" hand stamped and accompanied by a series of posters also designed by Russom. These releases will follow a narrative line and the six pieces of music tell a story of clubbing and the long journey through the night and into the next day. In this project, Russom carries his ability to create rich sonic landscapes to the dance floor using minimal but intense arrangements and high-energy repetition.