(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
Kerry Leimer, a Viennese advertising graphic designer raised in Chicago but based in Seattle, began composing synthesizer music in 1978. In 1980 he founded Palace Of Lights to promote the music that he and a few others were producing.
In the brief and austere aphorisms of Closed System Potentials, the influence of ambient Brian Eno and the connection with post-minimalist avant-garde were still evident, but there was also a tangible tendency to expand the horizons toward more open harmonies. Leimer lays out his slow tonal decays, often developing in waves (Aerial, The Random In Nature), then distorts them with tiny sonic events (seagull cries and arcane reverberations in Four Pages From An Unfinished Novel, jingling bells and piano chords in Field Characteristics), until they verge on dreamlike effects (A Little Figure).
Later, with exotic and dreamlike works such as Land Of Look Behind and Imposed Order, he adopted a ritualistic and pan-ethnic style in which African percussion, Arabic vocalizations, and Japanese arrangements collapse into one another, in the spirit of John Hassell and David Byrne. His commercial peak would arrive with the collective Savant (which also included Marc Barreca), beginning with Stationary Dance in 1981.
Leimer is one of the most evident links between the classical avant-garde and new age.
Leimer also formed the ensemble Savant with other Seattle cohorts.
Their only album, The Neo-Realist (Palace Of Lights, 1983), contains
Dadaistic pieces such as
The Neo-Realist, a deranged spoken-word piece that borrows from
Talking Heads and Frank Zappa, and
Shadow In Deceit, the best implementation of their
the tribal surrealism.
Artificial Dance is a compilation of Savant recordings.
When he returned in the new century, Leimer became even more prolific:
The Listening Room (Palace Of Lights, 2002),
Statistical Truth (2004),
Lesser Epitomes (2007),
The Useless Lesson (2007),
Degraded Certainties (2010),
Permissions (2012),
Premap (2014),
Fog Music 29 (2015),
The Grey Catalog (2015),
Field Characteristics (2015),
Re-enact (2016),
Dual Mono (2017),
Threnody (2018),
Mitteltoener (2018),
and
Irrational Overcast (2019).
A Period of Review (2014) is a double-disc compilation of rarities from 1975-83.
