Ethan Rose
Ceiling Songs
locust 84 CD/locust 71 lp
CD / 180 gram LP
2006-09-12

"an enticing homemade album that used short sounds to create long ones. Flickering snippets of instruments overlap and accumulate to create restless but mellow collages that sound vaguely nostalgic" - The New York Times

"arguably the freshest thing you’ll hear this year." - Punk Planet

"the new record by Portland sound artist Ethan Rose would make Stockhausen proud. Made of broken music boxes, sampled birds & delicate piano melodies, these recordings are memorable for their heartfelt attention to detail" - xlr8r

"somehow a ghostly essence of nostalgia, yearning and a hard-to-describe otherness still seep out of these compositions" - The Wire


"a blissful soundtrack to enjoy just before you hit the pillow and dream of electric sheep. - paper thin walls

It's the sound of the world taking a well-deserved nap. -Music For Robots

It’s remarkable how much Ethan gets out of so little; like doing beautiful photographs with a pinhole camera.- Dream Magazine

Ceiling Songs are made from the ground up. Here is what they are made of. Mostly taped up player piano rolls, broken music boxes, stringed instruments, feedbacking squaky speaker birds, holy holy afternoon sunglight, self serving computer interruptions, archaic mechanizations, and all the sad and happy people everywhere...They made me do it....Ethan Rose is a musician and sound artist based in Portland, Oregon whose solo activities focus on the disassembly and reconstruction of familiar and forgotten noises. By making use of found objects and automated musical instruments as source material, his work is an exploration of order and accident; meandering consonant sounds that stretch the confines of the object's original intention. To date, Rose has produced two small run multiples for locust: 2004's miniature & sea & 2005's the dot & his first fullength Ceiling Songs. Initailly issued as a vinyl only gem at the end of '05 (locust71), you folks who put away and / or never acquired a turntable have a chance to get the drift of IT.