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The Soul of the Rainbow and the Harmony of Light (Expanded)

by GROWING

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    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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  • Limited Edition Cassette
    Cassette + Digital Album

    The Soul of the Rainbow and the Harmony of Light issued on cassette for the first time ever in a limited edition by Laffs & Danger. The digital release includes seven bonus tracks – the entirety of the 2007 live release on Conspiracy Records, totaling two complete live shows recorded at North Six (Brooklyn) on 07.18.2004 & Free 103.9 on 01.15.2005.

    Includes unlimited streaming of The Soul of the Rainbow and the Harmony of Light (Expanded) via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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Onement 18:32
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Anaheim II 07:21
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about

GROWING's 2004 sophomore album expanded! The digital release includes seven bonus tracks – the entirety of the 2007 live release on Conspiracy Records, totaling two complete live shows recorded at North Six (Brooklyn) on 07.18.2004 & Free 103.9 on 01.15.2005.

For the first time ever, The Soul of the Rainbow and the Harmony of Light is issued on cassette in a limited edition by Laffs & Danger!

"GROWING, the process of change through which an entity remains the same, started in Olympia in around 2002. I remember the new name being slightly controversial amongst my apparently quite bored and aesthetically conservative peers. At the time the fashion was nouns and adjectives conjugated in the service of vague ironies; a present, progressive band name that insinuated humility and sincerity was shockingly pretentious in that specific historical context. But GROWING is nothing if not syncretic and comprehensive. It arose from a shared experience of meager spiritual and material existence within an absolutely fucked system. The band retained the oppositional materialism of yesterday’s hardcore in a condensed and nuanced form. Their new music was wider in its acknowledgment, more generous in experience and more sustainable in its response.

"Like all transitions, GROWING’s was, in retrospect, pretty funny. Joe and Kevin had already been hauling huge cabinets up flights of stairs for years by the time they decided that bodily vibrations spoke more eloquently than the men with red and wrinkled faces who garbled polemics over inaudible PAs and dispensed with the whole bit. I remember being fascinated watching one of their drummers struggle to muster equivalent intensity by hitting the floor tom with a bunched handful of sticks, producing only a virtually inaudible thud and ridiculous grimace while Joe’s eyes seemed to plead with him to stop. At the volume they played at, the performative aspects of live performance were redundant. All the outward manifestations of aggression seemed like ludicrous miming and once it was gone you could focus on purity of feeling. That being said, if anyone has a copy of the apocryphal US tour video from 2002, get in touch— I love to see a great band struggle.

"'The Soul of the Rainbow and the Harmony of Light' is the band at their northwest peak. It was recorded at home by Joe and Kevin at the house on 7th Avenue in downtown Olympia. We’d moved to the house together after being evicted from the squalor of the Bus Stop House so that it could be transformed into a place where people could get makeup tattooed onto their eyelids in the basement. The new house was positioned between two parking lots and a train tunnel and the only neighbors were kind and private meth heads with a mattress on the porch who ended up torching the place. At the new house you could be as loud as you wanted, which was basically the only criteria that mattered regarding quality of life.

"GROWING would throw expanded house shows with multiple guitars going through loops set up in various rooms. Strangers would wander in, fuck around with their gear and look at all their stuff. It was intimate and open. The band was investigating synesthesia (the record’s title is taken from a 19th century pamphlet describing the attributes of Bainbridge Bishop’s newly designed ‘Color Organ’) but the approach was uniquely, refreshingly sober. It was not a hippie affair. They’d play drab Hi8 videos of strange, dull residential enclosures and uncanny clips of fighter jets in flight, print photos of ominous foliage, create subtly twisting patterns amidst fringe perceptions which escape the tongue. It was all heavy, environmentally responsive and thorough. The lightness of simple colors came later.

"'The Soul of the Rainbow and the Harmony of Light' was fundamentally pre-internet. Their aesthetic required a lot of manual work and references were deliberate and ideologically laden. The title of the record alludes to combinations within the possible range of vision. It’s a strange synthesis of influences; the intensity of endurance in NASCAR, the tired mournfulness of Ephraim-era Thrones, the eery synthetic imagery of Hugh Lentz, the sublimated spiritual positivity of Terry Riley, the pure minimalism of Two Lane Blacktop, the sarcastic nihilism of Flipper, the esoteric visuality of Popol Vuh, the broken reflexivity of Throbbing Gristle, etc etc.
References are so tired these days, constantly called to authenticate, but Growing never liked the tawdry explicitness and dull functionality of proper names. This record creates its own field of shifting depth and it still sounds fresh: a green pasture in which to continue the pursuit of present meaning.

"I’m grateful that they’re still around making music, creating chunks of sustained coherence in the broadest sense. I’ll take as much of that as I can get."

~Dylan Sharp / Gun Outfit (friend, musical peer and occasional roommate.)


"Growing’s music can be loosely defined as drone or ambient, but their body-vibrating towers of tone soar and scorch in ways often missing from those placid genres. By letting their guitar and bass buzz out into vast expanses, they are muscular but not quite metallic, hulking but never harsh. The album’s 18-minute scene-setter “Onement” finds them knocking on the doors of the Dream House, before heavier pieces like “Anaheim II” and “Epochal Reminiscence” bow down into the full-blown amplifier worship of a group like Sunn O))). Dip yourself into the duo’s steambath of sound and your soul will come out the other side cleansed." - Jesse Locke, Aquarium Drunkard

credits

released October 2, 2020

MEMBERSHIP: DORIA - guitar and bass, DENARDO - guitar RECORDED AND MIXED AT HOME AND AT MAGNETIC PARK, 2003/4

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all rights reserved

tags

about

GROWING New York, New York

JOE DENARDO
KEVIN DORIA

Solo records:
ornament-music.bandcamp.com

kgdsound.bandcamp.com

past members:
SADIE LASKA
ERYN ROSS

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