Tuscon-based fine artist Daniel Martin Diaz and perfumist Lesli Wood have announced their music collaboration titled Others. To coincide with the announcement, they have shared an otherworldly avant-garde video for Geist, which includes a mashup of sections off their upcoming record, also title ‘Geist’ (German for spirit or mind). The record is a meditative and moody mix of influences ranging from Can to Faust while remaining completely contemporary. ‘Geist’ will be out this Fall via Cindelic Records.
The equally moody video for Geist is a compilation of haunting images that takes the viewer on an experimental journey of quiet, contemplative listening and immersion into beautiful sonic spaces. Watch the video clip via YouTube below.
Formed in 2016, Others is the project of two artists longing for something more experimental in their musical work. Lesli Wood (Cobra Family Picnic) and Daniel Martin Diaz (Trees Speak, Amelia Poe) began these recordings in Wood’s warehouse studio, inviting one guest musician to sit in for each live session. Abstract violinist Vicki Brown, known for her “psychosonic visualizations,” is featured throughout the record, along with guest artists Ben Nisbett, Gabriel Sullivan, Julius Schlosburg, Damian Diaz, and Michael Glidewell.
This avant-garde project has one foot in the 21st Century and the other shifting among various eras of the past, sometimes in a dance, sometimes a dirge, of synths and dulcimers. Freed of genre limitations and preconceived patterns, the musicians were encouraged to explore wildly, using the foundation of a ‘broken’ consort of 18th Century chamber music wherein one musician introduces a melody, motif, or sound and the other musicians respond as they see fit. Recording sessions were lit by candlelight and shrouded in incense smoke, establishing the mood for composition, calling to mind, as Diaz describes, a gothic cathedral “filled with early analog synthesizers with vines growing out of them, a living breathing entity of music that transcends time and space.”
