Agents Del Futuro - Grange Music CD

Agents Del Futuro is an ever-changing group of musicians that play the music of composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer Jesse Solomon Clark, who grew-up in Virginia but now lives in the Berkeley, CA. Sometimes it's just him and other times it's him and a few others. Sometimes it's him and many others. After years of pursuing electronic music abstractions and ambient soundscapes, Jesse returned to composition and more traditional instrumentation. His most recent effort is Grange, a full-length album featuring lush and fierce lap steel guitar chords, heavy and loose post-rock beats, interlocking percussion patterns, and a sound design-laden haze that is at turns moody, serene, and nervous fluttering. Featuring Joe Lewis on upright bass, Cornelius Boots on bass clarinet, throat singing, taimu-shakuhachi and metal pipes, Rich Bologna on prepared piano and organ, and Alan Stewart on acoustic guitar; Grange can sound like both a rock band as well as a small chamber orchestra. Grange is an instrumental concept-heavy album, a melodramatic non-representational portrait of America from the time of the annexation of Texas to the present day. Named after The National Grange Of The Order of Patrons of Husbandry, the album is influenced by open spaces and the relentless, rigorous and sometimes menacing order imposed on the land by humans. Jesse used a constellation of related ideas to give the album shape: Manifest Destiny, golf, the disappearing bees, manufactured realities, deserted towns, regicide, migration of species. The sound could be classified as post-rock or experimental. Composed and performed exclusively on acoustic and electric (as opposed to software-based) instruments, Grange is certainly not an electronic music album, although the arrangements and editing give it a contemporary form.