Biography
During a long fallow period following the release of her self-titled debut on Apostasy Recordings back in 2005, as The Opera Glove Sinks in the Sea, Gwyneth Merner started suffering from abrupt hearing loss – tinnitus and crackling in her ears. Though she eventually recovered most of her full range of hearing, this lengthy period of muffled sound greatly altered her approach to making sound. Where her earlier recordings were more reliant on field recordings alongside traces of violin-tinged theremin playing, Merner’s new work under the Byssus moniker explores more seriously the deep basins of her semi-restored hearing threshold. On “Hunting the Bitter Rose,” the theremin is now brought fully to the forefront as a monophonic tone generator, a key holding many potential corridors. The current model, however, is less Clara Rockmore and more “Zeit”-era Tangerine Dream, with a sidelong glance towards Eliane Radigue. This new output could be viewed as an exploration of her instrument’s many permutations of sonic mimicry: elements of scuzzed-out pipe organ, drastically elongated psych-guitar shredding, the long-form meditations of “No Pussyfooting”. Partly a journal of heated melancholy and partly a self-examination of one woman’s inner ear canal, “Hunting the Bitter Rose” is a work that unfurls gradually, revealing a sound puzzle that contains echoes of familiar emotions yet lacks any single defined framework."
Artist descriptions on Last.fm are editable by everyone. Feel free to contribute!
All user-contributed text on this page is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.
