“Most of this album was written during my stay at the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony in Temecula, California. I had an electricity-free cabin to myself which housed a huge, coffin-like grand piano 'once played by the great Rachmaninoff'. There was a woodstove, kerosene lamps, a manual typewriter, a high bed with an imposingly ornate wooden headboard, plenty of mice & stinkbugs and an integral 80-year-old caretaker named Robert. There was a small adobe library full of art books, a frog pond which grew sonorous by nightfall, a cell-phone tower on the property... I made friends with the dark, there. I'd lost my night vision after years of living in cities ?

Later that summer I met Todd Horton, a jazz musician in Brooklyn who'd heard some of my cd-r albums and was interested in working with me on new recordings. We met in a park and I was charmed by his rainbow-painted toenails. We recorded tracks in his house and mine over a period of several weeks. I was adamant about 'no compression' mixing and mastering at the time.

Once we'd finished the album together, I felt really unsure about it. I put it away for a few months and in early 2004, made copies for a few friends who also expressed ambivalent feelings about the songs. I went ahead and created some cover art, and about that time those same friends began telling me that the songs were starting speaking to them . My friend, Matthew Lombardo, brought some of my newly-packaged cd-r versions of “Oh Vanille / ova nil” to Other Music in the East Village, where they agreed to stock the album. I sold hundreds of hand-packaged copies through their store before the album was picked up and distributed on cd by Important Records in Massachusetts.

This album has received lots of love from people all over the world.
Their response has been enormously encouraging for me !
“Oh Vanille / ova nil” was rereleased on 12” vinyl in 2010,
pressed by 3 Syllables Records in Cardiff, Wales."

www.dianecluck.info/ordering/?item=0 ( vinyl )
www.dianecluck.info/ordering/?item=3 ( cd )

--Diane