COELACANTH MUD WALL Press Release Coelacanth is the collaboration between audio speleologists Loren Chasse and Jim Haynes, who have returned from the depths with the fully realized documentation for their third album Mud Wall. For those versed in the pastoral psychedelia and minimalist hymns of Jewelled Antler (i.e. Thuja, Blithe Sons, Franciscan Hobbies, etc.), Mr. Chasse needs no introduction. Mr. Haynes is an artist and journalist who has something of a reputation thanks to his chemically corroded visual sensibilities and his opinionated thoughts found in the pages of The Wire. Together as Coelacanth, Haynes and Chasse operate the tools of an imagined science to explore the various possibilities for sound to originate from traditionally non-musical materials. Alchemy, as a systematic if impossible attempt to transform base metals into noble ones, is an adequate parallel to Coelacanth's arena of research. Chasse and Haynes encourage sympathetic relationships between carefully chosen materials and sounds, and push them in ways that they might transcend their purposefulness. Copper, stone, glass, sand, shortwave radio, rust, wind, water, and mud are the active participants in their events and situations, providing both metaphoric potentials and visual sensibilities for Coelacanth's activities. From these situations, the duo invokes a sound that is an aggregate of sustained harmonics, continuously evolving sound forms, and broad gestures of textural details, and that which could be described as a 'broken minimalism.' Originally appeared in a condensed version on the Mystery Sea imprint, Mud Wall represents the third report for Coelacanth. The twenty minutes of recomposed material and a beautifully silkscreened packaging now render Mud Wall complete. Within their metaphoric laboratory, Coelacanth sifts through viscous electrical fields, slumbering vibrations, and aerosolized pricklings to arrive at a sublime construction coursing with a monumental physicality. Coelacanth's sound research situates itself somewhere between the quiet expressionism of recent AMM and the John Duncan's psychological inquiries; yet at the same time, Chasse and Haynes prefer to leave the subject matter of their investigations an unknown quantity. In their purposeful hermeticism and ephemeral poetry, Coelacanth teases potentials for meaning and allows the listen to fill in the rest. -- Helen Scarsdale, June 2004 Limited to an edition of 400 with silkscreened covers.