Black vinyl LP. Edition of 500.
Abacomancy (defined as "a form of divination based on the interpretation of the patterns in dust, dirt, silt, or sand") is the first record by the duo of Derek Monypeny and Kevin Corcoran. Monypeny and Corcoran have a decades-long personal and musical relationship; they played in the free-improv trio DMPH with the late tenor saxophonist Chad Stockdale, who released a 7-inch on Stockdale's Weird Forest label in 2010.
Abacomancy is the result of a one-day recording session in Monypeny's adopted town of Joshua Tree, CA in the spring of 2022. Entirely improvised, the tracks display an impressively wide variety of approaches/moods/emotions: from blistering Sharrockian skronk (Part One) to meditative Eastern-influenced shimmer (Part Three, which features Monypeny on shahi baaja), to dark, foreboding long-form drone (Part Five). There's a remarkable synergy at work here; particularly impressive is Corcoran's highly sympathetic and textural playing on the quieter, more drone-based tracks. Monypeny, whose free-improv guitar playing has not been much documented on record, presents a gamut of sounds and dynamics, taking Abacomancy far beyond a typical document of a high-energy/free-blowing session.
From Kevin Corcoran:
Shortly after the Abacomancy recording session, I returned to the Mojave desert to make location sound recordings and photographs while staying in an off-the-grid research cabin in the Granite Mountains. Following lines etched in the land by atmospheric forces (channels left by rain runoff, fractured boulders, windblown flora, a volcanic crater) and by traces of human infrastructure (fenced off boundary limits, transmission towers, irrigation lines, abandoned architecture), I took a series of walks to observe and immerse in the desert landscape. The images collected here are compositions found in the weathered scatter of stratigraphic surfaces and the eerie stillness of industrial and agricultural disuse in expansive spaces.
The Mojave Traces booklet included with Corcoran and Monypeny's Abacomancy LP features black and white digital and analog photographs made with a pocket-sized Ricoh GR, Polaroid Sun 600, and medium format Holga pinhole camera. Edition of 500.