Larrison :: Connecters Vol. 1: Original Recordings, 1992–1999
While lurking in the digital darkness of Greenwood, Indiana’s ambient archives for over thirty years, local legend Larrison Seidle finally has the creative chance to rise from the prolific past like a private-press particle eager to exist for a brief moment through the tender ears of local listeners who were hip to its poetic presence at the time. Encouraged by his family, in particular his father, to pursue an interest in music, Larrison and his older brother idly stood by. He watched him improvise on the organ keys in a manner of melodic mystery as the weird winds of sound exploded from the synchronous motor. “It ended up with my father sitting at the organ some nights, making up, and playing over and over, this one song that I can still remember the first few bars of,” recalls Larrison about the formative memories before diving into the endless elements of sound, tonal textures, and meditative melodies for himself. It wouldn’t be till 1985 that he eventually asked his father to purchase for him a Casio CZ-5000 keyboard, which he would later discover had a sonic secret hidden in its gears, a sequencer. During a tremendous time in harmonic history, when home recording and days of the demo dynasty reverberated in the intimacy of the industry with artists like Daniel Johnston, Sebadoh/The Folk Implosion, and R. Stevie Moore, to name a few, blazing the tape trails, Larrison was quietly manifesting melodies, while simultaneously collecting captivating content through his midwestern memories of what music meant to him. The aspiring artist’s findings would soon lie dormant after submitting his lone masterpiece, “Connecters”, to ND magazine for review, which was ultimately overlooked upon its atmospheric arrival some thirty years ago. There’s an old saying that “everything happens for a reason.” Well, depending on what side of the bed you wake up on, or what stage of life you find yourself attempting to master at any given point, this statement has always been riddled with the weight of wonder.
Some things need time to gather up that digital dust, where legends tend to hide. Their sonic spirits forgotten under the radical rubble of time and culture’s swift response to the intense items of legend, they need space to eagerly expand their mysteries so the rest of the world can catch up to its melodic messages hidden beneath the earth’s cozy crust. If you’ve ever found yourself curious or intellectually interested in how music is initially discovered, or sometimes more importantly, goes undiscovered for so many years, Larrison’s sonic story is a classic of its time. While occupying a spiritually charged space near downtown Austin, Texas, Larrison recorded a handful of songs on his CZ-5000, which ultimately gave him the atmospheric ability to tap into something sonically sophisticated through endless wave signals, psychedelic patterns, and ritualistic rhythms. Across the album’s twenty-six tracks of splendid songs and carefully crafted compositions, a breathtaking body of work takes flight across a lyric-less landscape, while endlessly exploring a liberating light of tangible tones and oscillating odysseys into the unknown. After the discovery of a single cassette labeled “Connecters”, which was one of 1200 pieces of music that were submitted to Daniel Plunkett and ND Magazine throughout its lifetime from 1982 to 1999, Freedom To Spend co-founder Jed Bindeman acquired the cassette collection at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. After endless hours of ear-numbing listening, he finally discovered something incredibly iconic right out the gate. Featuring tracks like “Song From a Bedroom in Podunk, Indiana”, “A Late Start”, “Moonplay,” and “Rewind”, to name a few, Larrison was truly onto something during the harmonious height of his youth and sorcery into sound culture. ”Connectors Vol. 1: Original Recordings, 1992-1999” is a mind-boggling mediation from start to finish, and one for the academics and heads to sink their ears and eyes into. Released on the New York-based label Freedom To Spend, which brought you Sister Irene O’Connor’s acclaimed 1973 masterpiece “Fire Of God’s Love”, and other oscillating oddities of the past, present, and future, listeners will find themselves in familiar company, communicating with the tonal treasures that help build a seducing society of sound and melodic mystery.
