The Tower of Mirrors

by David Shea

The Tower of Mirrors cover art
  • Type: Album
  • Released: 1995
  • Label: Sub Rosa
  • Country: United States
  • Length: 1:14:29
  • Community rating: 3.65/5 from 3 ratings

Album Notes & Community Reviews

Operating heavily within the downtown New York experimental scene, David Shea utilizes an immense array of samplers to construct the labyrinthine audio structures of 'The Tower of Mirrors'. The album violently splices disparate cultural audio fragments鈥攔anging from classic exotica to modern orchestral bursts鈥攊nto a highly complex, cinematic collage. It serves as a defining masterwork of 90s plunderphonics, actively blurring the lines between composition and curation.

Genres

Descriptors: Avant Garde, sampling, complex, experimental, avant-garde, orchestral, diverse, conceptual

Tracklist

  1. Red Jade (1:43)
  2. Entering (1:27)
  3. The Tower (2:56)
  4. Mirrors (0:46)
  5. Elegy (3:13)
  6. Exotic Gardens (2:30)
  7. Locus Solus (2:10)
  8. The Green Green World (2:35)
  9. Kuan-Yin Mirrors (2:35)
  10. The Forbidden City (1:45)
  11. The Machines (4:40)
  12. Chang-O Changes Form (3:45)
  13. Tuning (1:25)
  14. The Pure Land of Illusions (6:31)
  15. Canto I-XX (2:08)
  16. Schizoid (5:25)
  17. Hammer and Anvil (2:56)
  18. The Red Chapel (3:14)
  19. Canton Noir Blues (4:32)
  20. Song of the Old (1:18)
  21. The Lovers (3:16)
  22. Sallambo & Salome (4:43)
  23. Broken Jade. Four Directions Battle (5:38)
  24. The Elder of the Void. Awakening (3:07)

Credits

  • Paul Klee - artwork [inside: chaos & spiral]
  • Erik Friedlander - cello
  • Vivian Huang - narrator [mandarin chinese narration], text by [text compilations]
  • Zeena Parkins - piano, piano [prepared]
  • David Morley - synthesizer [analog synthesizer programming]
  • Sim Cain - tabla, percussion
  • Tiziana Kutic - text by [italian and french text]
  • Dave Douglas - trumpet

More from David Shea: full discography