Album Notes

Discobolus Rechords is proud to announce the arrival of the NEW Art of Flying CD:
ThOUGH the LIGHT seem SMALL
(discobolus #017)

Art of Flying is music woven around the songs of David Costanza & Anne Speroni; formerly of the 80s LA improv band The Whitefronts, and more recently the New-Mexico-based eldritch-folk Lords of Howling. Along with drummer Peter Halter (LOH, FRIO) they have recorded seven CDs for Discobolus records & one 10" record (released by Cochon records) at Art of Flying’s analog lair in Questa, NM, The Barn Recorder

OK. Maybe it was a mistake moving from San Francisco, California, 20 years ago, to the New Mexico desert—a land with plenty of scenery but no scene; where clubs, fanzines, promoters, and radio bandwidth were in short supply and what little action there was oriented itself towards feel-good Adult Contemporary on the one hand, and Norteno music on the other, reflecting the two main subcultures of northern New Mexico.

Or, maybe moving to nowhere was exactly what was needed to create the space and time for all this great music to unfold. You know, like the Kabbalistic doctrine of Tzimtzum, where the godhead "contracted," or withdrew, to allow room for Creation. Or is that just crazy?

Art of Flying traces its bloodline back to the 1980s punk-improv band The Whitefronts, and Denver free-jazzers FRIO, through improvisers campouts and workshops and ultimately 12 albums with the Lords of Howling in the 1990s. Somewhere in there all that improvising crystallized into rich and unpredictable song structure that sometimes gets called "folk" but only when there's another word in front of it that means something along the lines of "not folk."

(Basically we weren't clever enough to make up our own name for it, like "Naturalismo" or "New Weird America." But smart people knew, like WFMU, who named our most recent release: asifyouwerethesea, one of the best of 2005, or the East Bay Express who consistently ranked us as "best music of 200X" until their editors told them they had to pick someone else).

“Best Music of 2004”
—East Bay Express

“Critics’ Choice”
—New Times Los Angeles

“Thoroughly brilliant”
—Eugene Weekly


. We sound like this:

Art of Flying take a ghostly, lost-on-the-moor sound and transfer it to the desert. Their music moves from stonerish low rock to raw-boned country folk, Dylan-esque word paintings to Tom Waits-like demishanties, and, sometimes, there's even an unlikely hint of Kate Bush.

--New Times, Los Angeles

The gentle, air-going trio flies a little sideways through a spacy sprawl of fractured noise folk and understated psychedelia.

--Westword

Dave says their music is an acquired taste, but if that's so, I acquired it the first minute I ever heard them.

--Jenny Sue, Dancing Elephant Studio

The astonishing folk universe of ex-San Franciscans Dave and Anne Costanza is simultaneously expanding and becoming more focused, with production by Larry Yes that spreads a soft, glowing blanket of keyboards, bicycle bells, finger-snaps, reverb, and ambient goodness all over the proceedings.

--East Bay Express

I listened to it, and it was like lanterns lighting up, colored lanterns, one by one.