Markus Floats
Fourth Album
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CST174 180gLP + art prints • CD • DL
Release date: 20 October 2023
Duration: 33:03
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Sharing his in-progress recordings with a trio of close friends and collaborators from the powerhouse free music ensemble Egyptian Cotton Arkestra, each of these players then spent a day improvising to the tracks at Montréal’s Hotel2Tango studio. With violin by Ari Swan, saxophone and mbira by James Goddard, and guitar and drums by Lucas Huang, Floats stitched their extemporized instruments back into his compositional process. The result is a fluid, lustrous, dynamic expansion of his sound and structure that continues to strike the ineffable balance of abstraction and soulfulness rightly highlighted and celebrated in the critical response to Third Album. Fourth Album sustains much of that previous work’s enchanting equanimity, while inviting a bit more restlessness, accident and grit, with the incorporation of acoustic instruments and improvisation melding Floats’ own background in Electroacoustic Studies and Jazz Performance more than ever before.
Signature avant-electronic explorations of arpeggiated and timbral transformation, subtle shifts in harmonic consonance and dissonance, and a through-composed praxis that draws coterminously upon free jazz, musique concrète and modern Minimalism, all continue to shape Fourth Album to great effect. But an additional palette of sonic and gestural raw material is now also decidedly “out-of-the-box”, charting a wider range of gestures, textures and temporalities. Fourth Album complexifies and intensifies across its 12 tracks, thematizing dualities and introducing new elements of play and accident, even a sort of looseness here and there, as it conjures communal expressivity within shorter, still scrupulous formal structures. Fourth Album also for the first time includes spoken word as a recorded element, previously only (and always) a feature of Markus Floats live performances. The album’s final track samples the poet and activist Fred Moten, closing with these words: “What we’ve been trying to figure out how to get to is how we are when we get together to try to figure it out.” This koan of socially-engaged process and creation/advancement of meaning through praxis and immanence reflects the unique fusion of intangible materiality and affective sensibility at work in Markus Floats music, unfolding with new depths and currents with Fourth Album.
PACKAGING NOTES
180gram LP Art Edition comes in 350gsm Arktika jacket and 300gsm Arktika inner with two 12"x24" art prints on 170gsm uncoated paper, all featuring original artwork by Markus Floats. Jacket has colour flood inside. Vinyl includes download card.
CD comes in a 20pt uncoated paperboard mini-gatefold jacket featuring original artwork by Markus Floats.
CREDITS
All songs written, produced and mixed on unceded Indigenous land in Tiohtià:ke / Montréal by Markus Lake
Ari Swan: violin
James Nicholas Dumile Goddard: saxophone & mbira
Lucas Huang: drums & guitar
Markus Lake: electronics
Fred Moten appears courtesy of Dr. Moten
Recorded at Hotel2Tango in Tiohtià:ke / Montréal in February 2023 by Ky Brooks
Mastered by Harris Newman
Artwork by Markus Lake
Photographed by Stacy Lee
A special thanks to all the punks
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Québec, The Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada and Canada’s private radio broadcasters. Nous reconnaissons l’appui financier du gouvernement du Québec, du Conseil des Arts du Canada, du gouvernement du Canada et des radiodiffuseurs privés du Canada.