Hope For The Trees / Blodeuwedd LP Direct From Artist

Seminal NYC multi-reedist Doug Wieselman releases beautiful standalone single Hope For The Trees via figureight records.

Wieselman has performed with superlative greats (including the Lounge Lizards, Lou Reed, Yoko Ono, Bill Frisell, Iron & Wine, Laurie Anderson, Tricky, Martha Wainwright, Antony and the Johnsons, CocoRosie) and contributed significantly to the NYC Downtown scene over the past three decades. He is described, by NYC Jazz Record, as “a vital force in the New York music scene”.

"In 2016 I found that I was not making much new music, and was frustrated about it. My friend Thomas Bartlett (Doveman) suggested I borrow his spare OP-1 to see if it would lead to anything. Soon after that, I started to find some things while exploring this new machine. The basic loop for Hope for the Trees came out of this. I captured it on a small digital recorder and did some real time processing. As time went on, I wanted to see if I could develop this. I started to hear ideas and melodies and started to play and record them on bass. I then added electric guitar and shakers. After some time I asked my friend Aaron Roche if he’d be interested in helping me to work on this piece. He agreed - so I went to his loft where he added some trombone tracks as well as some processing on the shakers and helped me to organize the tracks.

At another point, I was at Aaron’s again, hoping to get a little more help - when various people showed up, including Shahzad Ismaily. While listening to this track he expressed an interest in adding some percussion. He was able to do this more recently - recording his percussion tracks while he was in Iceland. I had done some preliminary mixing at home and brought the multi-tracks in to mix at Figure 8 Recording with Phil Weinrobe, which completed the process.

The title - Hope for the Trees - comes from an ancient Welsh Bardic poem - Câd Goddeu (Battle of the Trees). I’d been reading Robert Graves’ The White Goddess and he talks a lot about this poem. The line is actually there is hope for trees - but I conflated it in my mind as it popped into my head as the title for this piece." 

credits

released December 7, 2020