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This latest release from Sean McCann picks up right where 2018's excellent Saccharine Scores left off, striking a lovely balance between stretched, blurred, and fragmented orchestral music and distracted, surreal snatches of spoken word. In the best way, McCann's recent work feels like eavesdropping on his subconconcious mind (though it is thankfully a subconscious mind with all of the boring bits edited out). Much like its predecessor, Puck is a series of warmly beautiful reveries swirling with mental detritus that feels meaningful, yet those impressions elude any connections or context that might illuminate what that meaning possibly could be. As a result, Puck is frequently quite moving in a profoundly ineffable way. McCann proves himself to be remarkably adept at mimicking how memory works, as we do not get to choose what lingers and what disappears: mundane scenes, fleeting impressions, and legitimately important moments all jumble together in a weird stew and there is no predicting what will bubble up to the surface next (or why). In lesser hands, an album in this vein would probably feel like a self-conscious attempt to blow my mind with wild surrealist juxtapositions, but McCann largely gets the tone and the execution exactly right: Puck is a beautifully casual, organic, fragile, and intimate album. It is quite possibly McCann's best as well.
It is very tempting to describe Puck as essentially Saccharine Scores, Vol. II, as the two albums are very similar stylistically and even feature some of the same source material.However, that glib description would not do justice to McCann's subtle and ingenious evolution over the last year, as Puck feels like an even deeper plunge into his subconsciousness and soul, blithely cannibalizing and recontextualizing older work into something compellingly novel and even more poignant.That is especially true of the album's first half, as the three-part "Folded Portraits" suite is primarily sourced from rehearsal recordings made for "Portraits of Friars" in Stockholm last year.Collaged into those recordings, however, are a number of other pieces ranging from 2018's "A Folded Rose" to snatches of much earlier recordings dating from as far back as 2008.In essence, McCann has seamlessly blurred together his solo home recordings with his recent ensemble compositions to weave something hauntingly elusive, shifting, and emotionally resonant. The album's scrawled, handwritten liner notes provides a loose road map to unraveling which earlier pieces surface in which new context, but the blurring of lines in these collages is so seamless that the lineage of any individual fragment is more or less irrelevant: all of those disparate threads decisively belong here now (it just took some of them many years to reach their proper destination).
While the opening "Nightfall" beautifully transforms from a haze of echoing voices and sensuously swelling strings to a swirling, richly textured crescendo of string loops and twinkling piano, the strongest pieces on the album are the more longform works "Broth" and "Puck."The former falls into the "Portraits of Friars"-derived suite and gradually blossoms from a delicate piano piece into a swooning, heavenly crescendo of massed strings and female voices.Further enhancing the experience are some very feral-sounding vocals from McCann himself, which he describes as "recordings of me gagging and yowling in my car."While that admittedly sounds jarring on paper, it is actually perversely beautiful in execution, as McCann weaves a gorgeous and immersive spell from a host of "false starts and stops and tests," yet makes it seem like all that beauty is a merely a veil concealing something far more ragged and primal.
"Puck," on the other hand, is a more text-based affair featuring Lia Mazzarri that seems primarily inspired by found texts about Fabergé eggs (as well as eggs in general).The underlying music, however, has earlier origins and McCann describes the new piece as "a mold growing on top of a quintet I wrote called 'Vilon.'"Like "Broth" before it though, it is essentially a lovely tour de force of McCann's production genius, as achingly gorgeous strings, voices, and tinkling pianos endlessly and organically cohere, dissolve, and re-cohere into new shapes.In fact, "Puck" may very well be a new high water mark for McCann's vision, as I cannot overstate how skillfully the various threads are woven together: it is like wandering through a maze of memories where a dozen different threads are constantly bleeding together or drifting off in compelling new directions.Normally, pieces built on such shifting sands do not work particularly well, but this one is a striking exception, as slow-moving string swells provide a grounding that precariously holds it all together.
While I have enjoyed quite a lot of McCann's work over the years, it is hard to see Puck as anything other than a culminating achievement where all of his strengths are finally aligned at once.I am also quite impressed at the amount of reflection and merciless self-critique that must have been necessary to get to this place.Every facet of this release has some significant perils and McCann somehow managed to nimbly avoid all of them: orchestral works can be too mannered and pretty, found/cut-up text experiments can be self-indulgent and soulless, and ambitiously multi-layered production feats can feel bloodless and overwrought.With Puck, however, those various pieces are intertwined in a way that feels natural, vulnerably human, and improbably unpredictable and spontaneous.I suspect that using older work as a canvas for newer work was the innovation that allowed all this to happen as it did, as revisiting "finished" recordings liberated McCann from any perfectionist tendencies he may had during the original composition: once something is already done, there is no pressure to get everything right anymore and the various elements can be playfully deconstructed until something new emerges naturally.As such, Puck’s album cover is quite a poetic and apt representation of the album’s aesthetic: if the egg is viewed as a stand-in for an actual Fabergé egg and that Fabergé egg represents McCann's meticulously crafted recent work, Puck is what results when the shattered fragments are lovingly glued back together into an imperfect yet even more beautiful new form.
Samples can be found here.
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This NYC-based composer has long been a bit of a curious enigma to me, as he seems to travel primarily in experimental music circles, yet seems unwaveringly devoted to making very traditional and melodic classical music. In a quietly subversive way, however, composing simple, elegantly lovely piano pieces in 2019 is a radical act in its own right. That is where Waller (mostly) arrives on Moments, his third album and most minimal, distilled statement to date. That approach suits him well, though I am not necessarily sure he needed go more minimal than he did with 2017’s excellent cello/piano album Trajectories (released on Sean McCann’s always interesting Recital Program imprint). To some degree, Moments feels less like complete statement than its predecessor, resembling instead a kind of expertly curated mixtape of different piano composers unified by a knack for lyrical melodies and a sort of warm, wistful Romanticism. Some are among the most beautiful pieces that Waller has composed to date though, which makes Moments akin to a strong (if improbable) "singles album" of sorts. At times, it also feels like the beginnings of a major creative leap forward.
One bit of intriguing trivia about Michael Vincent Waller is that he seems to be the only person who has ever studied with La Monte Young that did not become a drone artist, become obsessed with Just Intonation, build bizarre installations, or compose radical operas.Instead, he has devoted himself to the "Western classical music tradition in its most archetypal forms," which is a bit like discovering that Norman Rockwell apprenticed for years with Salvador Dali or Marcel Duchamp.Curiously, Waller also studied with Bunita Marcus, which seems to have left more of a stylistic impact: one of the album's brief vibraphone pieces ("Love III. Images") favorably recalls Morton Feldman's penchant for queasily dissonant harmonies and lingering decays.For the most part, however, Moments seems most stylistically indebted to Erik Satie, as that name will be invariably evoked for all eternity whenever a piano composer is drawn towards simplicity and melody.Unseen World's description of the album presciently anticipates that comparison, but notes that Waller's more Romantic and emotionally driven work diverges from Satie's "blank canvas" approach.I do not necessarily agree, as I find some of Satie's work to be incredibly moving, but it is fair to say that Moments is a very purposeful, heartfelt, and melodic collection of pieces that could not be mistaken for ambient or "furniture music."At its heart, Moments is kind of an impressionistic diary of warm or bittersweet memories shared through a series of evocative vignettes.Every piece on the album seems to be inspired by a specific person or moment from Waller’s life and the album is anchored by two multipart suites entitled "Love" and "Return From LA."
Any attempt to make stylistic generalizations about Waller’s aesthetic on Moments beyond "simple" and "melodic" is a fundamentally doomed endeavor though, as the album is divided into tenderly lovely piano miniatures (played by R. Andrew Lee), impressionistic vibraphone interludes (played by William Winant), and outliers that elude either category.Uncharacteristically, I am most drawn to Waller's more straightforward classical fare.In particular, I love the lazily tumbling "For Papa," as the underlying arpeggios seem to hang in a state of suspended animation as the melody slowly cascades and ripples.Elsewhere, both "Return From LA-IV" and "Nocturnes-No. 1" feel like archetypal Satie melancholia, but either would likely be ranked Satie's finest work if he had written them himself.Much less understated is "Jennifer," which is an elegantly controlled storm of dramatic intensity.More importantly, Waller does some beautiful things with lagging, stumbling melodies that fleetingly break free from the central pulse to take on a life of their own."Return From LA-I" is yet another highlight, albeit a more Impressionism-inspired one, evoking a flickering, sepia-toned film reel of a magical realist Paris from a hundred years ago.For the most part, I tend to prefer it when Waller keeps things understated, which he does for most of the album.There are some exceptions though.The best of them is the closing "Bounding," which gradually blossoms into an impassioned crescendo of descending melodies that streak across the underlying chord progression like falling stars.
As much as I like to think I have developed a deep understanding and appreciation for the nuances of music, there are still some things that seem like absolute sorcery that I will never fully comprehend.For example, I could never replicate a good Merzbow album even if I had infinite time and all of the same gear.Similarly, I will never grasp how someone like R. Andrew Lee is able to look at some pieces of paper and make it feel as though he is effortlessly and fluidly conveying the delicate emotional shading and unusual timing flourishes that Waller had conjured up in his head.More specifically, I do not understand how some of the melodies in "Jennifer" could possibly be notated and replicated, as they seem to wind like tendrils of smoke independent of time signature or beat.As such, "Jennifer" and "For Papa" are the pieces that fascinate me the most on Moments, as Waller is able to make melodies dance and twist is a way that feels sensuous and natural (a very different achievement than dexterously playing with unusual time signatures in an ostentatious way).Those pieces are also the ones that make me feel like I have only seen the beginnings of what Waller’s vision will ultimately evolve into, as he has absorbed a impressive array of eclectic and radical influences, but they are only slowly, subtly, and seamlessly being assimilated into an aesthetic that is fundamentally grounded in melody and increasingly focused on making a direct, human connection.While it is no secret that I love wild ideas and ambitious experimentation for their own sake, the best albums tend to be the those that manage to tether those impulses to a center that has soul and strong hooks.To his credit, Waller seems to intuitively grasp that, though for now his feet are planted mostly on the side of melodicism.
Samples can be found here.
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Functioning as a preview for a work-in-progress record, the two songs that make up An Exercise in Defascination (which will appear as different mixes on the album proper upon its completion) herald the theme of deconstructing giallo films that will appear there. Drawing from film soundtracks, as well as the overall themes of that specific style of horror film, Contrastate distill those very essences into a brief teaser of terror and surrealism perfectly.
Giallo has always occupied its own niche of horror film due to some general stylistic consistencies:mystery and detective plots, over the top violence, and soundtracks that draw heavily on prog, hard rock, and jazz styles.With a healthy mix of supernatural tinges and mental illness, it is a distinct type of film and, like the predominantly American slasher films they inspired, are often extremely similar to one another and perhaps not the most unique of movie experiences.
Contrastate capture this right from the cover:yellow (which is what giallo translates to, referencing a type of pulp novel with yellow covers) with blood red, and a sickly yellow record contained within.The band wastes no time setting the stage on the title piece:haunting synth strings, creepy echoes, and unsteady tape effects make for an entirely unsettling start.From there the soundtrack references are immediate:pummeling drums, jagged guitar stabs, and decaying keyboards appear at times, sounding like a deconstructed and cut up take on Goblin’s scores, with the addition of some scraping blades and what sounds like power drills to add a bit of Foley work to really drive the point home.
On the other side, "Spasmo" features Contrastate working with traditional spooky organ sounds at the onset.With fragments of vocals and prominent bass guitar (anyone who has seen Dario Argento's classic of the genre Deep Red knows how integral the instrument is to the mood of that film), the overall sound lies somewhere between synth soundtrack and noir blues.Compared to the other side of the record, there is more space and a tense, though less terrifying mood throughout.
Contrastate succeed brilliantly in their attempt to create a sonic counterpart to the giallo style of film on this too-brief 7".Not only are their obvious references to the distinct soundtrack work associated with the films, but they also capture the non-musical elements as well.Violent sound effects, supernatural growls, and an unsettling sense of un-reality pervade.Although the style of film they are paying tribute to may not be known for its originality, the music they have made is anything but cliché.It is an excellent piece that stands on its own, but it admittedly has me extremely excited to hear what the complete work will be.
samples:
 
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As Gog, Michael Bjella has developed a rather expansive catalog of bleak, heavy music, largely centered around guitar, noise, and extremely dark moods. On 2015’s collaborative record with Robert Skrzyński, Black Box Recordings, he shifted his focus to more abstract, noisier fronts. For his debut release as Distance Machine, he has mixed up the plans a bit more. Things are still oppressively dark for the most part but in a subtler, ambient context that reference classic works of the style while still showing Bjella’s own spin on it.
Throughout this self-titled tape, Bjella chooses to work largely from a palette of sampled strings and bassy electronics, coming across in many ways as a throwback to the early days of dark ambient.Hints of early Lustmord and solo works from Mick Harris and James Plotkin emanate from poorly lit cavernous walls of sound that Bjella is composing from within.
Slow, bowed strings sounds open "The More Severe the Initiation the More Sacred the Dance," solidifying the sound into a very dramatic one.Bjella layers strings on top of one another, building into a dense film score like atmosphere that is a little too commanding to function in that capacity.He uses the full 16+ minute duration to allow the darkness to unfold.Strings are pared with swirling electronics and more abstract, unrecognizable bits that eventually closes on a haunting, ghostly note.
The mood does not stay as monochromatic throughout, however."Lorri & Tess" features him stripping back some layers of the mix, allowing a bit more room to breathe amidst the heavier tones.Overall though, there is not as much darkness to be had here, with some actual gentle, delicate moments that pass through.By no means is it a relaxed piece of music, but it does show a drifting, less oppressive approach to Bjella’s style.
The final piece, "Send Us More Chuck Berry," in some ways is like a hybrid of the two preceding compositions.Throughout a span of 18 minutes he reintroduces the darker tinges, more understated and weaved throughout pleasant building waves of sound.The heavier bits are present, but restrained, and as the sound becomes denser, this gloom becomes more pronounced. He also takes multiple opportunities to pause, and then restart the piece with a slightly altered arrangement.It becomes a repetitive, yet captivating motif throughout.
There are certainly similarities in Distance Machine to Michael Bjella's other work under his own name and as Gog, but the shift to dark ambient sounds makes for a distinct identity.The feeling is entirely contemporary, but I certainly felt some influence (direct or indirect) from the short lived isolationism genre in the mid to late 1990s.As a fan of that from its inception, which was during my formative high school years, there was a warm bit of nostalgia for me throughout the bleak layers of sound.Even without my personal bias, however, it is an excellent piece of music from beginning to end.
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The Students of Decay label has had an impressive run of being way ahead of the curve over the years, as Alex Cobb’s imprint was responsible for the first major US releases from artists like Sarah Davachi and Natural Snow Buildings. The latest artist to be welcomed into that pantheon is Sante Fe-based composer Theodore Cale Schafer, making his vinyl debut after a handful of cassette releases and a very bizarre spoken word/conceptual album on Spain's Angoisse label. Cobb describes the album as "diaristic" and prioritizing "spontaneity and ephemerality," which seems as apt a description of Schafer's fragile, hiss-soaked vignettes as any, as the aesthetic of Patience is definitely an elusive and impressionistic one. When Schafer hits the mark just right, however, the results are strikingly beautiful, achieving a rare balance of simplicity, intimacy, and soft-focus unreality.
It is a bit too early for a definitive prediction at this point, but there is a decent chance that Theodore Cale Schafer has presciently tapped into an imminent new zeitgeist in experimental music.I am basing this entirely on the fact that Schafer independently wound up in roughly the same place at the same time as Sean McCann, whose Puck was just released this week.The two artists share a very similar vision of acoustic naturalism, drifting conversations, and distracted, diffuse beauty, though they are separated by a significant difference in scope: McCann composes for ensembles, while Schafer's approach has a much more homespun, "bedroom-recording" appeal.For the most part, the eight sketchlike soundscapes that comprise Patience sound like they could have been recorded on a four-track using just a guitar, a piano, and some effects pedals.There are also some moments that seem like they have been more deliberately shaped and processed, yet the bulk of the album seems rooted in loose improvisations that have been fleshed out a bit with an additional layer or two."Blue Fleece" is the only significant aberration in that regard, as Schafer combines an Oval-style skipping guitar figure with warm ambient drones and a surreal swirl of submerged-sounding field recordings.Far more representative is the opening "Gold Chain," in which fragmented and rippling guitar and piano motifs lazily intertwine in a slow dance while distant voices creep into increased prominence.
Though they sometimes take divergent shapes, all of the pieces combine to seamlessly weave an absorbing spell that feels like a dreamlike and poetic gallery of hazy memories and lingering emotional impressions.At its best, Patience evokes a languorous cascade of moments like sleepily watching swaying curtains and the play of sunlight from the comfort of a bed or blearily watching the blurred lights of a city at night from the windows of a train.I am at a loss for a memory to match Patience's most gorgeous piece, though, as "It's Late" evokes an altered state that I have yet to experience.If I had to guess, however, I would say it probably resembles being serenaded by comforting, but lysergically distorted, wind chimes after I have just collapsed in front of a remote cabin in a feverish delirium.It is an absolutely perfect and sublime piece of music and I cannot think of anyone who has done anything similar nearly as well as Schafer does it here.
The album’s other near-masterpiece is the enigmatically titled "No Piano," which weaves a gently tumbling reverie from a warmly lovely melodic fragment that woozily loops and overlaps with itself.I would not necessary describe the remaining pieces as a significant step down in quality, as they do a fine job at sustaining the album's languorous and lovely reverie, yet they tend to be a bit less distinctive.Or they merely fall short of achieving the illusion of a lazily cascading flow of memory fragments that just organically sprang into being without the intervention of instruments, amps, pedals, or tapes.In the former category, I would place the quavering ambient haze of the closing "Hinoki."The latter is best represented by "IWYWCB," which kind of resembles a lo-fi Andrew Chalk: disjointed and pointillist guitar figures bleed together and intertwine over a field recording that sounds like a train slowly approaching a desolate seaside town in the dead of night.It is a likable piece, but a fundamentally limited one: the guitars are relatively unprocessed and the central theme eventually fades away without ever evolving into anything more.  
That "unpolished spontaneity" approach is the album's only real flaw, as Schafer's endearingly loose, organic, and casual aesthetic occasionally errs on the side of undercooked: it is very easy to imagine a better version of "IWYWCB" made from the exact same notes in the exact same places, but with added processing or effects employed to wring out a bit more texture and depth.Based on the more composed and meticulously constructed work from 2017's Debt//Duet tape, however, that simplicity and lack of embellishment was very clearly a conscious decision rather than a lack of skill.It is certainly a curious decision though.I am also surprised at how understated the non-musical elements are on this album, as field and voice recordings were the primary focus of some of Schafer's earlier releases.After hearing FaceTime (2017), Patience almost seems insufficiently diaristic: Schafer went from being extremely intimate to presenting decontextualized audio fragments of his life in a very veiled and cryptic way.Somewhere between those two poles lies the kernel of more emotionally resonant album.That said, while I have some minor issues with the details of the execution, I have none at all with Schafer’s overall vision.In fact, I kind of love it, particularly "It’s Late," which is as good anything anyone has released this year (to my ears, anyway).When he is at the peak of his game, Schafer explores an extremely precarious space between form and formlessness (and chance and intention) with unerring intuition and lightness of touch and it is a damn impressive achievement.As such, Patience is an impressively strong release with some genuine flashes of brilliance.
Samples can be found here.
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"Steven Stapleton;s iconoclastic Nurse With Wound project now enters its fifth decade, marked with this lavish boxed set of all-new music titled Trippin' Musik. Consisting of three vinyls in dayglo orange, yellow and green, the collection comes with no tracklisting and no indication of what order in which the listener ought to listen to it."
-via Norman Records
Tentatively out November 29th on United Dirter.
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A 4-hour work recorded at Steamroom (O'Rourke's studio) between 2017 and 2018.
Detailed and delicate electronic layers, processed instruments, and ambiguous field recordings come together in a slow-moving, fascinating kaleidoscope with multiple reflections and wrong turns, always in constant state of flux. The finely crafted art of subterfuge.
To Magnetize Money and Catch a Roving Eye: four CDs – a hypnotic, multi-faceted, labyrinthine piece which flows as slowly as a river while speeding back through memory, and shows all the talent of Jim O'Rourke.
More information can be found here.
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Fifty years after his debut release, Bill Fay – one of Britain's most enigmatic and celebrated singer-songwriters – returns with a new album, Countless Branches. Countless Branches will be released January 17th on CD, LP and Deluxe 2xLP, featuring artwork by Benjamin A Vierling.
Sounding more sparse and succinct than his previous records, Countless Branches collects compositions drawn from the trove of material Fay has amassed over 40 years. Unfinished songs emerge with newly written words and melodies on Fay's recurring themes – nature, the family of man, the cycle of life and the ineffable vastness of it all – as if they had been lying in wait to find their place in our current zeitgeist. The resulting ten songs are as pointed and poignant as anything he has ever recorded.
His third release for the label, alike previous acclaimed recordings Life Is People (2012) and Who Is The Sender? (2015), was produced by Joshua Henry – with the cast list slimmed down from previous sessions. Guitarist Matt Deighton remains as Fay's trusted MD and the musicians have mostly all played on Fay's albums in the past. But both Henry and Fay thought that, this time, there should be more of Bill on his own at the piano, or with minimal accompaniment.
It's at the piano, alongside some rudimentary home recording equipment, where Bill has been composing music in the intervening decades between his first and most-recent album at every chance he could get. His newest material retains the awestruck, inquisitive feel of those early songs. They often evoke landscapes, ancient and sacred places, as their author traverses the outdoors to marvel at it all. And he is doing it all from that corner of his room at the piano, while the word about his work continues to grow and spread like so many branches. For decades now, Bill Fay's songs have been his ambassadors.
While still reluctant to play live or make public appearances, Fay's resolve and his purity shine through the work and make him a special artist, finding his wider world from that corner of the room – and long may he continue to do so.
More information can be found here.
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"Mechanosphere is Cam Deas' abstract yet poignant second album exploring ideas of rhythmic dissonance and head-spinning proprioceptions for The Death of Rave. Following directly from his cultishly-acclaimed mini-LP Time Exercises, which was surprisingly deployed in Richie Hawtin's recent "CLOSE COMBINED - LIVE" mix and hailed as "Holy F#ck-What is This?!?" by Brainwashed, his new album applies rich polychromatic colour to his signature rhythmic constructions with a greatly heightened emotive traction and broader appeal while only going deeper on his radical ideas about the fundamentals of sound and composition. Big recommendation if you're into Autechre, Xenakis, Ligeti, Rashad Becker.
Using a computer-controlled modular synth, Cam takes the simple idea of layering pitches in multiple tempi to Nth degrees, resulting in a sensational and warped sense of temporality and gravity-defying physics. Effectively placing pitch on a scale in a similar way to Conlon Nancarrow's player-piano programming or even Ligeti's famous metronome experiment, Cam explores solutions to the problem of grid-locked linearity, or at least perceptions of it, by effectively ripping the rug from under electronic music convention to make his music appear as though in perpetual freefall, or a process of omnidirectional contraction/expansion that never quite resolves - always the same, ever different.
In Mechanosphere listeners effectively navigate through the music by a loose means of pattern recognition, picking out accentuated kicks and hits that pierce thru Cam's incredibly dense swells of endless metallic tone. But where his Time Exercises LP was unreservedly abstract and emotive in an alien sense, his follow-up practically sounds as though aliens have developed a form of 3D midi folk-jazz or court music for bacchanals and spiritual reasons.
From the vertiginous scale of "Ascension," thru the the jaw-dropping hyper stepper "Slip," to the controlled chaos of "Reflect, Deflect," and ultimately the deeply solemn yet discordantly lush finale of shearing metallic pitches in "Solitude," Cam offers an often shocking and ever fascinating grasp of electronic music’s potential to relate hard-to-communicate but intuitively felt ideas to the body and emotions. It's a sober but incredibly wondrous sound, and only confirms that Cam's seismic stylistic transition this decade from preeminent, post-Takoma 12-string guitar player to visionary synthesist was certainly worthwhile."
-via Boomkat
Out now on The Death of Rave.
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"Andy Stott's first release since 2016 and first EP since 2011, It Should Be Us is a double EP of slow and raw productions for the club, recorded this year and following on from a series of EPs that started with Passed Me By and We Stay Together early this decade.
Recorded fast and loose over the summer, these 9 tracks (8 on the vinyl) harness a pure and bare-boned energy, melodies subsumed by drum machines and synths; slow, rugged abandon. It is all about rhythmic heat and disorientation, pure dance and DJ specials rendered at an unsteady pace, from percolated house and percussive rituals to moody tripped-out burners.
There will be a new Andy Stott album in 2020, but in the meantime... this one’s for dancing."
-via Boomkat
Out now on Modern Love.
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Sound In Silence is happy to announce the addition of Astatine to its roster of artists, presenting his new album Global Exposure.
Astatine is the solo project of Stéphane Recrosio, based in Paris, France. For about two decades Recrosio is better known as member of the post-rock/slowcore band Acetate Zero with whom he has done several sublime releases on labels such as Arbouse Recordings, Intercontinental, Claire’s Echo, Drumkid Records and others, and shared the stage with The Album Leaf, Encre, Empress, Rothko, The New Year and Chris Brokaw, among others. Since 2011 Astatine has released numerous albums, EPs and singles on labels such as Cotton Goods, Cantos Propaganda, [A…]UTOPROD, Éditions Vibrisse, Doubtful Sounds and Recrosio’s own labels Orgasm and Fissile.
Global Exposure, Astatine’s new full-length album and first for Sound In Silence, features twenty new compositions with a total duration of something more than 46 minutes. Utilizing fuzzy electric guitars, delicate acoustic guitar arpeggios, mumbled and distorted vocals, minimal bass lines, rough drums, heavily processed found sounds, loops of abstract noises and field recordings, Recrosio creates one of his finest works to date. The album also features Laurent Box, Recrosio’s bandmate in Acetate Zero, who contributes on two tracks, while George Mastrokostas (aka Absent Without Leave) expertly did the mastering, highlighting the album’s lo-fi sounds, balanced by the tape hiss of old 4 and 8-track recorders.
Bringing together influences from lo-fi, post-rock, shoegaze and experimental, Global Exposure is an album full of noisy soundscapes and ambient interludes, reminiscent of Acetate Zero and the early works of Hood, Sebadoh and Guided By Voices.
More information can be found here.
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