The Black Lake EP is the hidden twin of Louis Jucker’s Eight Orphan Songs. These haunted tales, taped within three days in an isolated cabin in the canadian woods, seem to have been recorded by the mermaids themselves, or some malicious beaver who found a dobro and asked six mushroom-high deers to handle the choirs.
These 4-tracks lo-fi recordings were initially made to be the soundtrack of an exhibition Louis Jucker put with plastic artist Giona Bierens de Haan in Switzerland. Together they elaborated slow moving wooden machines, animated by the songs. They also re-built the “Black Lake” they found in Canada – a thick, unpenetrable surface, dark as death, cold as deep waters and scary as a night alone in the woods – in the middle of the gallery.
” It was a very intense and creative time of our young lives. We originally went to Canada to shoot the clips for Eight Orphan Songs with Augusitn Rebetez and spend some weeks in the wild. We found the small cowboys village you see in the clips and we played there like we were 7 years old. It was a perfect moment of the year to be entirely depressed and stupidly happy at the same time. My only real luggage was my tape recorder and Aldo Leopold’s ‘A Sand County Almanac’. I bought the instruments there, and though I had no plan to make an album, the songs came as easy as my daily life was then, drifting on a tiny boat, chasing ducks with a home-made bow that didn’t work at all.”
Hummus Records is proud today to re-release the highly limited edition of cassettes Louis Jucker and Giona Bierens de Haan made for the exhibition in 2013 on 12″ inches and CD. The Black Lake comes as a hand-cut and hand-printed edition of 300 copies, which sees the Out of Gas DIY workshop outdo themselves once again. A complete remaster of the orinigal tapes has been done by swiss producer Morgan Hug (Lune Palmer, Organ Mug, etc.).
credits
Recorded and mixed by Louis Jucker on Tascam 4-tracks – August 2013 – Wentworth, CA
Digitally remastered by Morgan Hug – July 2014 – Lausanne, CH
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Artwork by Giona Bierens de Haan – September 2014 – Lausanne, CH