Today Kramer has returned with a new single and video for “Whispers For The Living.” The track comes from his forthcoming LP …and the crimson moon whispers goodbye, that will be released everywhere you stream your music on December 12th. If you’re enjoying the new video, please consider pre-saving Kramer’s new record here.
This album marks your first solo work in five years—what shifted creatively or personally that led you toward this four-part “drone-poem”?
I wouldn’t call it a shift so much as an evolution, and like most evolutions, this one happened slowly, as my interest in song-form drifted away and my decades-long attachment to the possibilities of SOUND AS MUSIC once again began to consume me as it did in my late teens and early twenties. The revival of Shimmy-Disc in 2020 gave me the opportunity to create ‘And The Wind Blew It All Away’, which was an album of songs that accurately expressed what i needed to say at that time, but since then, i’ve felt little compulsion to SAY anything at all, alongside an almost religious yearning to express who i am without the use of words. The exploration of long-form minimalism and drone pieces provided me with a direct line to articulate the evolution of my emotions, and so-called ‘ambient’ music allows me to recreate the point of origin that fueled those feelings i had when the pieces took shape in my head. Also – and this is vital – in performance, i can easily summon the places in which i found the means to create this new music, which is something i could never accurately recreate with the performance of songs. Ideally, there should be no distance between music and listener, as the time-worn barriers between performer and audience breaks down under the weight of the drones, the use of repetition, and the subtle manipulation of the ambience summoned by both the music and the physical space in which it is being presented. If the listeners allow themselves to be drawn into the music – and by ‘into’ i mean INSIDE – a transcendental experience can be reached, illuminating the possibility of inner CHANGE. CHANGE is one of the most important things in life, but you must seek it out in the shadows. It’s never clear or openly apparent. I’m always in search of the Sublime, but words very rarely ever took me there. Sound always takes me everywhere.
“Whispers for the Living” is paired with imagery drenched in red, a color that seems central to the LP’s world. What does red symbolize for you within this project, and how does it interact with the Joyce passage you chose to share?
Red is the color of Violence, Vengeance, and Love. We are born in a moment of beauteous violence as we leak out from a world of liquid silence and into an icy world of uncertainty, bad behavior and most crucially, Chance. We do battle against the forces of Chance our whole lives, and it is a formidable adversary. Dreams provide a short-term refuge from that war, and they have always been a constant source of ideas for me. Not long before i began work on ”’and the crimson moon whispers goodbye”, i had a dream of an elderly Joyce in a graveyard, surrounded by tombs, snow falling from above, reading through thick glasses the final paragraph of DUBLINBERS, which is of course also the final paragraph of his greatest short story, THE DEAD. As his voice lowered in both pitch and volume during the last sentence of his reading – as if those would be the last words he ever spoke – the snow suddenly changed from crystally white to blood red. This was the subconscious point of origin for my new LP in its entirety, and the visual springboard for the accompanying ‘Ambient-Cinema’ piece for ‘Whispers for The Living’. It’s all about dreams. I’d be nothing without them.
The album includes 48 minutes of bonus material—a live recording of “Music for Pianos & Sunflowers” from Big Ears 2025. What inspired the decision to include that material, and how does it connect to the themes of the new record?
That is for the listeners themselves to decipher. The music itself must lead the way toward any potential connection between the two compositions. I’m not a big fan of artists who step onstage and begin a song by saying, “This next song is about…” – blah blah blah. If the song is good, it needs no introduction or explanation. The same goes for a piece of instrumental music. If there is no mystery to decipher, and no place in which the listener can gather themselves and find a place of their own in which the music can be born-again inside of them, the experience is a useless one. So i would humbly beg you to allow me to refrain from explaining my decision behind connecting ‘sunflowers’ to ‘moon’, in the hope that the listener will have no compass to guide them – or rather, distract them – through the process of discovering it and encountering the kind of self-revelation within which they might have a new and unique experience in connecting the two, which i hope will be different for each listener. I don’t care at all about what Arvo Part or Morton Feldman or Gavin Bryars or Lamonte Young were thinking when they created their greatest works, and i hope the listener doesn’t give a damn about what i was thinking when i created my music. I would dissuade them from questioning, and from all forms of intellectual inquiry. All i ask of them is that they LISTEN, and right now, at this point in my life, i feel that music that moves slowly through changes that are often almost imperceptible, potentially opens a multitude of doors to places unfelt, unknown, and unseen before. Something truly happens when listening to music in which almost nothing actually happens. It is a radical event. But if we ask questions of what we are hearing – such as “why was that done?”..or even worse, “how was that done?” – that sublime and deeply personal process of self-discovery is brought to a violent halt. Music, like cinema, is not to be understood. it is to be experienced.