Lines by Core of the Coalman

We're very excited to be releasing this incredible 4 album set of Viola drones by Jorge Boehringer/Core of the Coalman. Here's a bit more info about it from Jorge himself-

Around 2011, my friend Jakub and I, with other friends and colleagues, would regularly visit the house his grandfather built by hand in Všenory, in the Czech Republic, for art making, discussing, and hanging out, usually around a fire. I began to use a small rectangular basement passage full of tools and firewood as a little studio on these visits. The ceiling was low, so I sat on a small stool on the floor where I could bow my viola, and played sustained sounds with feedback, and also sometimes using my voice or a harmonica, until the whole place felt like the inside of a vibrating string.



I recorded some of these continuities, slowly, and after moving to the UK in 2014 I started to edit and mix them a little bit. Eventually they announced themselves to me, so I stopped working on them and they became the Lines on these four cds.



Jake Blanchard has created a lovely release for these with custom, hand-made linocut prints for each of the cds.



For me, these pieces resonate strongly with my thinking about other forms I experience in the landscape. These aren’t lines that separate anything from anything else, but openings, like a deep valley in an environment of contrasting texture or a mountain range seen from above.



Maybe they existed inside the viola strings, the wires, the harmonica reeds, and the shape of the room just waiting for all these things to come together and be listened to. Maybe the sound here is the sound of that basement space, like the way a mineral crystal or fossil might emerge from some liquid filled hollow in some other form. But I think that these pieces also spill out, push forward on their own, and take on their own shapes like young versions of rivers that will later meander across the landscape, shaping it.



Jorge Boehringer, 2022

Tor Press is a label run by illustrator and co founder of Tor Fest Jake Blanchard. Covering folk/ psych/ experimental/ noise/ drone/ etc. Specialising in hand printed artwork.

torpress.co.uk