The primary step in understanding Standing Still, Facing Forward
is to recognize Ensemble Economique is Brian Pyle.

Brian Pyle is Ensemble Economique. This is the first LP release
from Ensemble Economique. Digitalis issued the At the Foot of
Nameless Roads CD in 2008. Ensemble Economique’s fantastic
earliest recording, entitled No GPS, was bundled as a
CDr with a limited initial pressing of At the Foot, but has yet to
be properly issued. Both recordings are important primers to
Pyle’s nascent invocations of Holger Czukay’s Cannaxis (on No
GPS) and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontake (on At the Foot).
With 'Standing Still, Facing Forward' Ensemble Economique
provides the most mature realization of Pyle’s compositional
process, which utilizes found sounds, fi eld recordings, and musical
performance that he later meticulously edits, layers, and
loops in the studio. The effects of these processes are dramatic,
cinematic and conceptually rigorous and this recording
evidences Pyle as an important new composer emerging out of
the long and storied tradition of West Coast experimentalism.
Utilizing a delicate combination of the homespun improvisation
of his other project, Starving Weirdos (whose work sounds like
an American echo of AMM) with his own unique variation on the
European avant-garde in Ensemble Economique, Pyle’s practice
involves a dense approach to composition akin to assemblage.
But unlike electronic and laptop composition, Pyle’s studio
work aims to re-establish an organicism associated with live
(or, in the case of the fi eld recordings, lived) performance that
pushes the studio out into nature and nature into the studio.
In short, the Northern Californian landscape plays an integral
part in Ensemble Economique’s soundscapes, and this record
captures much of the atmosphere of Pyle’s home terrain.

REQUIRED WRECKERS

With equal nods to Throbbing Gristle’s retrograde conceptualism and Recommended Records unwavering musicality, Amish is pleased to announce the Required Wreckers Series. R/W will explore the work of artists operating at the intersections of sound art, improvisation, drone, outsider experimentation and modern composition. In the spirit of its
name, R/W aims to disrupt the boundaries typically used to delimit genre and the sensibilities that help to inform taste. In so doing, R/W slips out from under the simple, reductive classifi cations so often used to discuss, and even critically engage, contemporary music. Situating R/W in the gap between Throbbing Gristle’s celebrated a-musicality and the
unrelenting craftsmanship of Henry Cow, these releases acknowledge their debt to historical precedent.

Each release is a one-time vinyl pressing and will be housed in a letterpress band (designed by Bryan Christopher Baker) that will vary with each installment (each will also be available in the vastly inferior digital format). These LPs will also include artwork and assorted ephemera that invoke our deepest respect for the medium and the hand-crafted
(and assembled) components we regret have disappeared with the rise of digital media. R/W terminates after ten installments.