Jeff Greinke is a musician, composer, performer, and sound sculptor who is known worldwide for his unique sound. Through a highly developed process of layering, Jeff composes and performs music rich in texture, depth, mood, and subtle detail. Using various acoustic and electronic instruments, found sounds, and extended studio techniques, Jeff sculpts soundworlds that conjure a strong sense of place, hovering somewhere between the exotic and the familiar. With numerous releases to his credit, Greinke has been an active artist for more than three decades and has composed music for film, video, dance, theater, radio, and art installations.

All of the sounds heard on Jeff Greinke’s new album Noctilucent are electronic, made by keyboards with samples, forming textures and atmospheric presences. Noctilucent is a word used in meteorology to  define a rare type of cloud phenomena, called  night shining clouds, which occur in the upper atmosphere, higher than any other cloud.  They  exhibit tenuous wavy patterns, are silvery or  bluish white, and are typically visible on summer  nights in high latitudes.

Making music is by far Greinke’s greatest passion, nature has informed and shaped this work in subtle but significant ways. He has a seemingly insatiable drive to be in the studio and work with sound.  He puts a tremendous amount of care into this work, the joy of creating music brings out all the glorious colors of his beautiful range, deep blue and purple in the shadows of the peaks, green and brown where grass and rock mingle, and an endless perspective of jagged rock and pointed crags, until these are themselves lost in the distance, where the snowy peaks rise grandly over the desert gardenscape.

“This collection of works is the result of my first foray into using virtual instruments. Up until recently my studio had remained fairly static since the early, mid-90’s. I started to upgrade my gear slowly a couple of years ago, then early in 2021 began exploring plugin instruments, primarily a variety of synthesizers I obtained through Native Instruments. I found having access to several new instruments at once, with seemingly infinite capacity to manipulate sound, to be incredibly inspiring.” Greinke continues, “My process has been consistent over the years. Most of my music is made without the pressure of a deadline. This affords me the luxury of being able to just fuck around with sound, searching for sounds that interests me, honing in on that, and then layering new sounds from there until something evocative starts to take shape. I take my time, sometimes tweaking things for days or weeks even. I think I’ve gotten pretty adept at knowing whether or not a particular sketch has promise. Anything short of that gets discarded rather quickly. In that way, my success rate in completing tracks that end up on an album tends to be pretty high.”

“This album verges more toward what I consider to be ambient music than anything I’ve done in decades. My focus was on creating soundscapes rich in texture, evocative moods, and abundant three-dimensional space. Melody and more conventional timbres such as those created by traditional acoustic instruments, which had become a greater focus of mine in recent prior years, have either retreated further into the background or are absent altogether. All of the music was electronically produced. I found it refreshing and somewhat liberating to go back to exploring sounds using synthesizers to sculpt my soundworlds, with the expansive palette those instruments provide and abundant opportunity to manipulate sounds. “

The overall mood is subtle, the sound is primed for interpretation, like the clouds, with a huge vista appearing solid while being gentle. The music possesses a quite extraordinary range of different timbres and vibrates along with the air inside it.  “Unrest” (4:31), a sound heard when the falling sunset threw into strange relief the ghost-like clouds which amongst the hidden mountains seem to wind ceaselessly through the valleys.

An ocean is a body of water that composes much of a planet’s hydrosphere, extraterrestrial oceans may be composed of water or other elements and compounds, and there could be evidence for the existence of oceans elsewhere in the solar system. “Of the Deep Sea” (5:02) brings purring leviathans and odd toothy monsters of huge sizes. In the distance, a bell, bobbing loose on the waves, sounding sometimes nearer and sometimes farther.  For the track titled “Tunnel” (5:34), sounds emerge from the dark opening ahead. The tension beats like a railroad track, and luminous spectra are frequently seen. Here inside the mountain, impulse will always tremble at the sound of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs.

The title track, “Noctilucent” (5:43) provides a sense of granular motion, perhaps a distant foghorn glows, conditions which will produce one sound-color round the margin of the cloud, and that color mixed with others, and so giving rise to other tints, farther in; at this specific unfolding altitude — the texture is very complicated.

The final track, “Undercurrent” (7:16), leaves us with views of the stars, galaxies, nebulae and clusters we look at during every season of the year. The light from the tiny lamps falls on all sorts of odd forms, as the rays cross each other, the opacity of our bodies throws great shadows, and they are gorgeous.

Composers sometimes seek new timbres, and Greinke is a time wanderer. There are no markings on the night sky, though there exist many sky maps to aid stargazers in identifying constellations and other celestial objects. All of the music heard on Noctilucent was composed, arranged, recorded and produced between May and October 2021 by Jeff Greinke at Another Room, Tucson, Arizona, and was mastered by Howard Givens, to be heard by any and all intrepid listeners by way of Spotted Peccary Music.

Noctilucent is available exclusively in digital format.

TRACKS

1  Unrest

2  Around the Corner

3  Of the Deep Sea

4  Into the Night

5  Tunnel

6  Sinking

7  Noctilucent

8  Refractions

9  Undercurrent

NOCTILUCENT is Jeff’s fifth release on the Spotted Peccary label. His previous SPM releases include OTHER WEATHER (SPM-3702), BEFORE SUNRISE (SPM-3701), VIRGA (LSM16), and WINTER LIGHT (LSM09). Jeff’s music can also be heard on numerous compilation recordings. Enjoy his SoundQuest Fest (March 28th, 2021) performance on YouTube at https://youtu.be/qZsavlFPbxI and more at: http://www.jeffgreinke.com/

About Spotted Peccary Music:

Portland-based Spotted Peccary Music is North America’s finest independent record label with a focus on deep, vast and introspective soundscapes. For over three decades, the artists of Spotted Peccary have been on a mission to develop, produce, publish and release ultra-high-quality, deep-listening experiences that engage the listener and exceed expectations. Every release is carefully prepared in a variety of high quality formats from MP3 to high-res studio masters. Explore more than 165 titles and 45 artists released over 35 years of excellence at www.SpottedPeccary.com and www.AmbientElectronic.com.

Links:

Smartlink: https://orcd.co/noctilucent

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/0aUDyR5GWN3KWrt2SOaRyv?si=UmAqQ9xKQuWEg_zcf276sQ

Spotted Peccary Album Page: https://spottedpeccary.com/shop/noctilucent/

Bandcamp: https://ambientelectronic.bandcamp.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spottedpeccary/