"Rust Smudges" reimagines Tim Story's 1987 release "Wheat and Rust" as a slow-motion tone poem of harmony and timbre, the 'smudged' suite then meticulously hand-dubbed by the artist back onto the small supply of original cassette tapes that were stored in his archives. This sumptuous, extremely limited hand-made edition of just 50 signed and numbered box sets (20 will be Metalabel exclusive) includes cassettes of both the newly-imagined "Rust Smudges" and the original "Wheat and Rust" album, a digital download card and signed booklet, each bundle housed in unique black boxes individually hand-painted by the artist. The digital assets include hi-res audio files of both "Rust Smudges" and the original "Wheat and Rust" album, and a pdf introduction to the project, with artist notes from Story.

Artist statement: "Released in 1987, "Wheat and Rust" was my fourth and final album for the Norwegian label Uniton/Cicada. In "Rust Smudges", I reimagine this small corner of my own musical history, filtered through the prism of time passed and the idiosyncratic path my career in music has traveled in the intervening 35 years. It is a distillation of my interest in re-contextualizing sound into new forms and experiences, and a fondness for a process I call ‘smudging’ — tone poems built by submitting existing music to a digital process that freezes and ‘smudges’ small samples into a slow progression of audio snapshots. The aural equivalent of watching a movie by viewing just one frozen frame every five seconds — the narrative is erased, only familiar echoes remain.

Rust — iron oxide — is also essentially what analog tapes are made of. For "Rust Smudges", I digitized a cassette of the original 1987 release, manipulated the two sides, then dubbed this smudged ‘suite’, one by one, back onto the supply of original commercially-produced "Wheat and Rust" cassette tapes which had been boxed up in my basement for three decades. The unpredictable degradation of aging magnetic media and mechanical parts is inevitable — each tape is unique, each will continue to evolve and decay as it enters its fourth decade and beyond.

Repurposing the remnants of my own mass-produced media into a small edition of hand-made objects was both intriguing and humbling. "Wheat and Rust"’s active melodies and intricate arrangements are reduced here into a hazy apparition of harmony and timbre, becoming a fitting — if melancholy — mirror of the way age and memory seem to soften sharp narratives into transitory pulses of feeling and recollection. Recycling both the music and the fragile physical media of my own past became a vivid reminder of the ‘cassette culture’ that was in its earliest generation when my fellow explorers and I first exploited it in the 70’s, out of necessity rather than choice. For me, "Rust Smudges" crystallizes — and subverts — the distances between the youthful exuberance I remember, and the inevitable, capricious passage of time. It represents a kind of wistful parallel fiction that straddles then and now. "

The Smudges Over his nearly 40-year path in music, Tim Story has been steadily, quietly deconstructing the “musician/composer” paradigm for which he was known. His efforts of the last 10 plus years, not unlike Steve Reich’s early tape-phasing experiments or the Bomb Squad’s meticulously constructed waves of concrète noise, have increasingly focused on the plastic, malleable nature of sound, listening and presentation, exploring the relationship between organic and inorganic sources, composer and listener. This is most clearly, and most recently, exemplified by the immersive nature of his successful "The Roedelius Cells" multi-channel audio installation which extends the creative process to the point of inviting the listener into the continually changing environment as a kind of “co-composer” via choice of physical proximity. Thus, the idea of memorializing Story’s work as an “album” or an otherwise fixed, finite form of presentation becomes somewhat restrictive and increasingly irrelevant given his ongoing quest for the essence of that intransitive moment where the artist meets, then creatively engages his audience.

Elusive, rich, organic yet ultimately artificial, Story’s "smudges" are a series of harmonic tone poems, originally created simply for the composer’s own enjoyment. Built essentially by submitting existing music to a process that freezes and ‘smudges’ small samples of harmonically-rich, looped phrases, these pieces cycle through a constantly evolving landscape that is both enigmatically abstract and warmly familiar. A kind of graceful, slow-motion half-sister to "The Roedelius Cells", Smudges finds Story fusing the Cells’ restless search for unique forms of recontextualization with his unabashed love of harmony.

Using mostly orchestral and acoustic sources for their variety, complexity and emotional resonance, Story experimented with hundreds of sounds and configurations. By trial and error he made the surprising discovery that, with careful construction, the resulting progressions could become profoundly more evocative and harmonically complex than the original source material. Never entirely shedding their organic beginnings nor their electronic evolutions, the Smudges generate an immersive illusion of orchestral sonorities, sometimes grand, sometimes ghostly and ominous.

Sharing the best of these pieces with a few friends and colleagues who responded with extraordinary enthusiasm, Story was eventually convinced to release them. Released in 2019, "Smudges One" represented 16 of the artist’s favorites from this growing collection of suggestive evocations. In the subtitle of this first volume "Virga"—rain which evaporates before it reaches the ground—Story found an image particularly suited to these ephemeral, ambiguous cycles which progress but never quite resolve.

Created in 2022, "Rust Smudges" marked the first time Story submitted his own music to the process. The recordings appear here courtesy of Dais Records, with our gratitude.