News spread today of the death of one half of the talented duo Celer: Danielle Baquet-Long, more commonly known as Dani, wife of Will Long, the group’s other half. A post was made at the Celer website, artificialcolors.blogspot.com, this morning at 9:33 AM by Will, reporting the terribly sad news. It’s been less than a month since I’d written about Celer here. They’d contributed a remix to a collection of songs by Electricwest, and of the 11 mixes, it was theirs I’d singled out for streaming and download — Celer had taken a minimal track titled “Goddess” and shredded it to something all the more dire, all the more minimal, and all the more intoxicating (disquiet.com).
A prolific group, Celer also appeared on the list of Disquiet readers’s favorite albums of 2008 (disquiet.com), and at the tail end of last year, the first time (to my recollection) I had ever written about them, they’d produced a sound-art work based on a glass house formerly inhabited by George Orwell (disquiet.com).
Not long ago, Celer launched a space at celer.bandcamp.com to stream and provide downloads of some of their work. The most recent free download there is an elegantly eerie five-track collection, titled Elias, which dates from November of last year. Each track is an ethereal drone, a seemingly light thing made of surprisingly dense details, lines of sound that appear fragile from a distance but prove sinewy and complex up close. The opening track, “Untitled 1,” plays like one long unresolved chord (MP3). It’s an excellent introduction to their work.
The loss of Dani is a sudden one, but she leaves behind an enormous amount of music to inspire others. More on the duo at artificialcolors.blogspot.com and myspace.com/celersite.