Ursula K. Le Guin & Todd Barton – Music and Poetry of The Kesh

Pete Swanson and Jed Bindeman’s RVNG Intl. powered Freedom To Spend imprint goes from strength to strength with this reissue of the invaluable 1985 recording Music and Poetry Of The Kesh by the sadly, recently deceased science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin and her musical collaborator Todd Barton, an Oregon-based musician, composer and Buchla synthesist who built and then taught himself to play several instruments of Le Guin’s design, among them “the seven-foot horn known to the Kesh as the Houmbúta and the Wéosai Medoud Teyahi bone flute.” while the prominent rhythm instrument in the album is the doubure binga, a set of nine brass bowls struck with cloth-covered wooden mallets.

Music and Poetry of the Kesh is a place like no other, having been created to accompany Ursula’s 1985 novel Always Coming Home, its mix of synthesis and real-world recordings trickle through a timeslip of resonant atmospheres that sound as if they have (still) been dispatched to us from the far future. As co-founder of Freedom To Spend Pete Swanson states “Ursula’s legacy is her work which transformed the world, and this is another piece of the universe that her imagination birthed becoming real.”

LP / Freedom To Spend

Cat. No. FTS009