Derek Baron & Zoots Houston with an array of objects and junk. Resonating metal surfaces, chains, paper, thin strips of wood, a broken radio, small battery powered oscillators and a floor tom. Passing cars outside the window. Silence. One microphone recording it all.   ---   "The well-captured minuscule texture selections of resonant metal, miscellaneous percussion, trivial objects, broken gadgets, chimes, and miniature oscillators map out a detailed environment, confined to a small area but given further reach via the movements of the devices in and out of the recording field as well as the creaks and clunks of the performance surface. There’s no forced claustrophobia, no artificial extrication from circumambience. We hear passing cars in the distance, gusts of air past the window: a wider universe in which these sonic events occur, not necessarily emphasized but present nonetheless." - Noise Not Music   --- Recorded in Chicago, December 2015. Released September 25th, 2019

Derek Baron is a New York based artist whose quotidian and diaristic work quietly fizzes with creative energy. With field recordings, text-based works, chamber ensemble works, solo piano works and various other techniques, their deft hand has scribed a compelling set of both stripped-back and collage-based releases on the likes of Penultimate Press, Recital, Regional Bears and their own label 'Reading Group'. For this new release they’ve treated us to a series of musical vignettes; uncovered fragments of memories and offering us tiny glimpses into their personal world. Tender, haunting and beguiling - these works burrow deep. "Fourteen Latches of Heaven and Earth is a collection of fragments from the last decade or so of my thinking about harmony and performance. "J&C" was a collaboration with V Haddad; "Herr Gott, dich loben wir" was recorded with Dominic Frigo. "Choral Arrival" is a group learning of the Franciscan Salve Regina, sung at the co-incidence festival in Boston in January 2019. "Choral Arrival" is named after a phrase by Annika Finne." - Derek Baron

Debut LP from New York's Derek Baron. Baron’s work muses on the interior and exterior via explorations of history, memory, listening, domestic ambience and the collective understanding of sound as amorphous matter. Crooked Dances presents a series of Erik Satie’s piano works as played in a flatshare with various interruptions by those who also contribute to the electricity, water and internet bills. Crooked Dances is a melancholic, playful journey rooted firmly in the real. "Satie’s Danses Gothiques (1893) and other keyboard sketches are interspersed/interrupted by conversation, drones both accidental and deliberate, and the ever changing mise-en-scène of rooms opening out onto further hidden rooms." The Wire Bland photographs supplied by Baron. ---

Derek Baron is a composer, musician, and artist. Curtain is a diary. Both in musical and non-musical situations, they attribute a filmic quality to their journal-like aural self-documentation. Dreams turn real then dissolve. Single phrases and events arrive and leave, abruptly. Yet, the overall sense of place that Baron creates is understood.Opening Curtain is the eponymous piece. A 21-minute live chamber work for quintet recorded in 2018. A musical assemblage of glued-together fragments and scraps of sheet music from Baron’s past. Compositions wrote in the small margins and folds of paper; illustrated in the art booklet included with the LP. The flute, violin, guitar, keyboard, and bass clarinet phrases saunter at a pre-sleep pace, until a subdued, yet ecstatic Mass theme ushers in periodically. Delivering the warmth of life… it is a slow beauty. It brings me such happiness listening to this piece. Its continuity is cut with scissors and pasted about oddly… all soaked in a certain malaise; a resigned grace.The next piece and other side of the LP, “Chancel,” is rather different. An audio journal flipped through, dropped on the ground, picked up and opened to another page. A confusing montage of world-ized musical snatches: car radios, church choirs emanating to the streets, moldy organs, domestic piano recordings. Similarly, machine vibrations, bodega conversations, and other environmental observations segue the harmony and disharmony of this listening experience. I’ll finish with some of Derek’s notes from the booklet: “Co-opting new achievements / Thank you for this incredible demonstration / This theatre of procedures / This consoling play of recognitions / No theatre but “what’s that”, / Nowhere for the silver ball to roll to. / How are we so in love.”