Music for Lamping

Strategy's Paul Dickow has been a longtime cornerstone player in Portland, Oregon's electronic and experimental music community. He was once a drummer in the punk group Emergency, a keyboard player in jazz/post-rock's Fontanelle, played drums and electronics in Nudge, DJs eclectic disco and techno sets, and also remixes and produces dancefloor bangers as well as ambient, abstract pop expressions under his solo moniker Strategy. He has built up a name releasing acclaimed albums for Kranky and 12"s for labels such as ORAC (Seattle) and Dreck (London) and also by founding the premier Cascadian freedom music record label known as Community Library. For years Paul and Audio Dregs have been comrades and collaborators and now we are proud to bring you his latest offering that collects Strategy's rain-soaked chillout recordings and slow motion filtered dubscapes. These are the tracks rescued from the mornings after the dance parties and longer compositions collected from his studio in moss covered corners of green Cascadian forest caverns. "Music for Lamping contains six years' worth of music that can roughly be called ambient - perhaps "meditative" is a better word. All of this music combines my interest in blurring/expanding/clouding processes--such as granular synthesis, vocoding, and bucket-brigade delay--with happenstance sound sources, such as field recordings or a favorite record sitting around the studio. The earliest music dates to a 2002 CD that was never released, entitled Strategy At Beacon Rock, which was intended as a 'gentle' or 'atmospheric' treatment of plundered audio. The material from 2004 onwards dates to a period of soundwalks in my neighborhood of Northwest Portland (a perfect strolling zone). Taken altogether, these pieces form a traceable thread through my work where I use my usual raw materials to reach a more liquid, spontaneous end result." -Paul Dickow