Note: This is an extended release of Nilan Perera's album "harmless love" (2003). Liner notes from the original release are marked by **

** The music on this cd was recorded with the improvisational process in mind. Not only the act of spontaneously creating music on an instrument, but the awareness and effect of the environment that the music was created in.

I chose the Penthouse Dance Space (Toronto, Canada) in February for several reasons: I had frequently rehearsed and improvised there with dancers, which rendered the space as a memory of visual activity, I loved the way the room sounded (in spite of the attendant difficulties this forced on the recording) and, since it was the dead of winter, the steam heated radiators would sometimes ‘go off’ at odd intervals like small metallic fireworks.

In order to make all this a present reality for the listener, we recorded this session using several microphones positioned throughout the space. The results of this process can be heard on the tracks that appear here. The only track that was not recorded in that environment was ‘wet land’, which was recorded at the Hallamusic Studios in Toronto. **

The original recording employed a custom Telecaster guitar designed by me and made by Mark Warren (Ottawa). Pedals used were a Boomerang Phrase Sampler, RAT Distortion, Digitech Whammy II Pitch Shifter, Jim Dunlop Wah and BOSS DD-5 Digital Delay. The preparations used included chopsticks, skewers, knitting needles and alligator clips among others.

The Demixes

After "harmless love" was released in 2003, I took the tracks and put a call out to my community for people to create interpretations/re-compositions of the material on the original recording. I was inspired by the experimental remix/sampling culture that was in full effect then and I myself had been playing with the Excalceolators, an ensemble whose recorded output consisted of extended and detailed remixes of the band’s instrumental work. The community ranged from well known international artists to people who dropped out of music soon after they created their work for me, but the common thread was their appreciation of "harmless love" and their connection to me and the global/Toronto art music scene we were all involved in.

Each demix, which is what Martin Tétreault labelled the process (as the artists were not using multitrack files) is identified with a track number and the artist’s name as I felt the music they made was themselves.
The ‘Nother’ tracks are treatments involving different pieces of gear (i.e. old Macs, cranky processors, etc). Nother himself has long since disappeared but I loved everything he gave me so they’re all there.
Some tracks used a fragment of a piece, others used the whole CD and one didn’t demix anything but used the title (A Job In My Factory) as an inspiration to making a work about working class life in Birmingham UK.

I was and am, eternally grateful for the enthusiasm, generosity and support of a community in full flower at the time, ranging from electroacoustic composers to hip hop producers to noise rock artists to DJs and everybody in between...when asked, the contributors response was basically, "cool, I’m in".

If anything the demixes are an example of a unified community of sound that knew no borders or limitations and were/are bound together in the appreciation of MUSIC.
Big love to all.

The Original Cover/Package Art

The original package was based on using cloves, cardamoms, nori (dried seaweed) and fragments of mosses and leaves from British Columbia, where I toured before the final package was put together. All these were suspended in a clear plastic CD case which also housed the CD and the liner notes.

The cover art was made in a time-based process involving laying out a CD cover-sized strip of orange Japanese silk paper, cutting random shapes out of nori, spraying the paper with glue and gluing the nori fragments to create images before the glue dried.

I made new ones when I ran out of completed ones. Roughly 300 of these were made and sold or given away and yes, the glue fumes were...interesting, lol. It was my way of making the work ‘live’ instead of having it remain static in shrink wrap somewhere.

Photos of one of the original CDs can be seen here (not uploaded by me): www.discogs.com/pt_BR/Nilan-Perera-Harmless-Love/release/5294167

I have continued that process of making the original recording package except to opt out of using plastic and making a simpler presentation.
There is no plan to issue hard copies of the demixes....they exist in the digital world that they were born in.