Valet
Blood is Clean (Kranky)
By Marisa Iacobucci
Published: May 23rd, 2007 | 8:26pm
Valet’s Blood is Clean is the kind of CD you take to yoga class. Or, if you miss the class, listen to the CD and you’ll still experience a healthy workout. How so? Well, Blood is Clean takes you to that “special” place or wherever you call the place where stressed folks need to go to get back to primordial pleasures such as deep breathing, lucid dreaming, and meditation.
Blood is Clean is Valet’s debut album. Valet, a.k.a. Honey Owens, has been a seminal figure in the Portland experimental music scene for over ten years, and she describes her music on this album as being “a medium [for] channeling sounds from an unknown place, opening up and spilling onto the computer-tape.” This means that Owens, influenced by such things as dreams, physical artifacts, shamanic chanting, and ancient drumming, engaged in live and spontaneous recording techniques with minor tweaks in the studio.
Owens’s unrestrained composition styles lead to the creation of eight tracks, which are altogether exploratory, yet also profoundly simple at their root. “North” for instance, is a widely spacious and ambient trip to the further edges of the galaxy using minimal sound techniques. Vocal treatments such as breathing and chanting infuse life into “April 6” and the title cut “Blood is Clean” features a show-stopping guitar solo.
Issue #35
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