THE Oort CloUd
This video was created by marQu vr, the same multimedia artist who created the amazing visuals during Alchymie & Gregg Skloff's performance at the 5th annual Sonic Dreams Festival in Waterford, Ireland. This concert yielded the recordings which make up The Oort Cloud – powerful excursions into the "drone-based ambient electronic music meets experimental new age film score" realms of their earlier work, with the live-in-real-time immediacy adding elements of industrial churn & psychedelic sprawl into the mix.
Listen to the rest of the album: Bandcamp, iTunes, Amazon
The Oort Cloud is available for downloading and streaming everywhere. CDs and photo booklets (12-page, full-color 6" x 6" booklet includes photos of Alchymie & Gregg Skloff during their live performance at the Sonic Dreams Festival in Waterford, Ireland) are available only at Bandcamp.
Image: C/2017 K2 PANSTARRS:
NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (UCLA)
Alchymie & Gregg Skloff continue their explorations further into outer sonic space in their new album, The Oort Cloud – a conceptual sequel to their 2016 Aerocade release, The Kuiper Belt.
Taking an ongoing collaboration from studio to stage, pianist/keyboardist Jennifer Theuer Ruzicka (from Naples, FL; operating as Alchymie) and contrabassist Gregg Skloff (from Astoria, OR) presented their debut public duo performance at the 5th annual Sonic Dreams Festival in Waterford, Ireland.
Astronomer Jan Oort's proposal of a spherical cloud of small objects in distant orbit around the sun has gained acceptance as the zone from which many comets appear to originate. On April 28, 2018 – honoring the 118th anniversary of Oort's birth – Aerocade offers a tribute to his brainchild: Alchymie & Gregg Skloff's The Oort Cloud.
photo credit : Max Ott
The Kuiper belt
Drone-based ambient electronic music meets experimental new age film score in this recording project between keyboardist/vocalist/composer Jennifer Theuer Ruzicka (aka Alchymie) from Naples, Florida, and contrabassist/improviser Gregg Skloff from Astoria, Oregon.
In late 2013, Gregg Skloff made the acquaintance of Jennifer Theuer Ruzicka & her musical project Alchymie. Initiated in January 2015, and over a year in the making, their collaboration The Kuiper Belt seeks to evoke our Solar System’s far reaches beyond the planets. Alchymie’s richly detailed arrangements envelop Gregg Skloff’s majestic contrabass tones in atmospheres of grandeur, by turns both ominous and serene.
“The line between the highly respected field of drone and its far less cool cousin new age has oft been smudged. When modern experimentalist Robert Lowe met up with veteran new ager Ariel Kalma last year, they buoyed each other for what became perhaps the most crowd-pleasing release for either party. There was enough sweet synth and water babbling to please the hippies, yet it avoided joss stick chillout just enough for the chin scratching intelligentsia.
This meet-up between nimble improvising double bassist Gregg Skloff and drifting keyboardist Jennifer Theuer Ruzicka aka Alchymie achieves a similar balancing act.”
— THE WIRE MAGAZINE
“Every track is just great”
— KZSU STANFORD