The Chord Fort is a new project of Jason Honea, known through the Jewelled Antler and 3 Acre Floor bands The Child Readers and The Knit Separates. For The Chord Fort, he teamed up with Cornish Ghadflei and Gerhard Siegl and recorded this EP live at Wallywoods Gallery in Berlin Kreuzberg.

The disc starts with the nine minute ?Smile Louder?, an excellent piece of minimal music reminiscent of Terry Riley or Steve Reich. The backbone of ?Smile Louder? consists of a farfisa drone and what sounds like a tape loop of field recordings recorded on some distant planet. On top of this background, one farfisa note gets hit repeatedly and somebody chants ?Ayea? in unsteady intervals. After four minutes, the background hiss gets louder and the farfisa part gets augmented. If ?Smile Louder? was a space expedition, its first part would be the flight with a space ship and part two the first steps on the targeted planet. During the nine minutes, you completely lose any notion of time and space. The hypnotic qualities of ?Smile Louder? are not to be underestimated.

?Regions of Memory? combines echoed chimes and bells with another farfisa drone and a background beat. It sounds magical, but is over after just one minute. If it was for me it could go on for at least another 20 minutes. That way the only help available is through the Repeat button on my CD-player. 8/10 -- Stephan Bauer (27 June, 2006)