Packaging Notes
LP is pressed on 180g audiophile vinyl and comes in a thick printed jacket with credits insert.
CD comes in a custom paperboard mini-gatefold jacket with a printed CD dust sleeve.
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Tracklist
1. Golem
2. Orientalism As A Humanism
3. On Golden Pond
4. Radio Free Ramadi
5. Lasers, Tracers, Radar Drones
6. Pawk
7. Home Security
Running time: 00:40:30
Packaging Notes
LP is pressed on 180g audiophile vinyl and comes in a thick printed jacket with credits insert.
CD comes in a custom paperboard mini-gatefold jacket with a printed CD dust sleeve.
Description The second full-length from this genre-defying duo is a somber and richly-detailed work that constructs a dystopic environment where the ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ are inseparable from electricities, radioactivities and the detritus of military-industrial technologies and materials. Through micro-recordings of metallic objects and resonances, field recordings, and raw filter-bank improvisations, Aden Evens and Ian Ilavsky (Sofa, Silver Mt. Zion) constructed a sonic landscape of polluted signal sources, weaving tentative, provisional signs of humanism into the mix by way of piano, organ and drums. Alms is an invocation and critique of the distortions and remainders generated by the violence of the war machine. It is also a confession, of computer indulgence and easy access to technology, of leisure and the freedom for creative play — a tiny sonic treatise on the poverty of our times and how we shield ourselves from it. This is not ambient music, or electronica. Please play as loud as possible.
Credits
Aden Evens: various instrumentsIan Ilavsky: various instruments
Recorded in various locations and assembled in Aden's attic in Arlington MA by Re:, 2001-2004. Additional drum treatments and mastering by Harris Newman.
Reviews
"Bleak, deadly, and utterly gripping… Raw and abrasive, yet full of texture and contrast…the tension remains cranked to the desolate end." – Kerrang!
"[A] tense collection of field recordings, acoustic instruments, slabs of industrial drone and rhythmic sound poems that resonate with an aura of sadness, superstition and paranoia." – FakeJazz
"[H]ypnotic art that leaves you entranced even after the last note has faded away... The record is filled with a dystopic array of sounds... Its constructions conjure up a cluster of eloquent political overtures that are as strident as they are, quintessentially, wordless." – Beta Music
"[T]he duo creates an intense dystopic portrait of a polluted civilization that commingles the organic with the industrial, the human with the electrical, radioactive and technological." – Stylus
"This excellent digitally tweaked assemblage of field recordings and acoustic instrumentation… occasionally recalls the viscous atmospheres and metallic sonorities of Thuja and Blithe Sons, but these more meditative passages are often undercut by blasts of machine-noise percussion and buzzsaw-sharp frequency oscillations." – The Wire
"Alms will hypnotize you from the beginning, envelope you with each subsequent chapter, and hold you in its spell until the final note has faded." – Splendid
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