JOYFULTALK, Automatisme & Stefan Paulus, T. Gowdy
Spring 2022 Bundle

Specially-priced 3-ALBUM BUNDLE available till June 1st.

3x180gLP BUNDLE includes limited-edition companion art prints exclusive to mail-order.

JOYFULTALK • Familiar Science
(Duration: 41:02)

JOYFULTALK returns with another vibrantly divergent stylistic take on the analog materiality and sensibility of electronic composer-producer Jay Crocker. Familiar Science rallies contributions from a quintet of musicians into a cosmic recombinant combo—still shot through with JOYFULTALK’s singular mixing desk kinetics, but this time deep-diving into gnarled and twisted, spliced and diced out-jazz. Crocker draws inspiration from 1980s M-Base music and Ornette Coleman’s harmolodic funk years, alongside more recent touchstones like (leftfield) Flying Lotus, (later) Tortoise, BADBADNOTGOOD and Squarepusher’s Music Is Rotted One Note. His own prior history as an improv guitarist also resurfaces for the first time in many years—an element in this polyvalent artist’s chemistry set that hasn’t appeared prominently in his own music for over a decade. Crocker lays down stacked wordless vocals on several tracks to complete the picture, weaving all these raw materials into exhilarating compositions that blur the line between sizzling corporeal combo and sampledelic futurist jamz. Familiar Science is a buoyant, delirious feast of noise-tinged polychrome electronic avant-jazz that takes Crocker’s composition and production acumen in an unexpected, highly accomplished, exuberantly satisfying new direction. JOYFTULTALK keeps revealing brilliant new facets and Familiar Science finds the project at its most intricately kaleidoscopic.

CST164
Automatisme & Stefan Paulus • Gap/Void
(Duration: 1:06:16)

The debut collaborative album by Automatisme (Canadian producer William Jourdain) and Swiss field recordist, visual artist, writer/academic and psychogeographer Stefan Paulus, who first met through shared projects with Mille Plateaux/Force Inc, including contributions to the Ultrablack Of Music anthology. Gap/Void is based on field recordings made by Paulus during mountain expeditions in the Swiss Alps, the Caucasus, and the Arctic Circle—documenting stormy weather, high alpine winds, avalanches, and sounds emanating from glaciers and from the insides of crevices and caves. Paulus folded these recordings into hundreds of layers of sound (like the geological strata of their geographic sources) and sent these ambient/noise pieces to Jourdain as raw material for his bespoke Automatisme techniques. Gap/Void leads with five rhythmic tracks (cut to 33rpm LP) featuring Automatisme’s trademark interstitial digital synthesis and elastic/erratic signal processing, followed by five companion tracks of the original ambient/drone works by Paulus reprocessed by Automatisme. (All tracks on CD/DL and LP download card.) Chain Reaction was a stylistic touchstone for the duo and Gap/Void also intends to resubstantiate the ambling, adrenal trajectories of Paulus’ original mountain climbs. A fine addition to Jourdain’s prolific body of recent solo and duo works, in line with his shift from the variable tempo strategies of Transit (2018, Constellation) and Alter- (2020, Mille Plateaux) toward the resurgent minimal dub/techno pulse of his Viatorism project (2020, Mille Plateaux; 2021, Diffuse Reality) and his 2021 Zeitgeist album with Beyond Humans (2021, Force Inc).

CST165
T. Gowdy • Miracles
(Duration: 37:48)

The Montréal/Berlin producer returns with a second LP for Constellation and follow-up to his acclaimed Therapy With Colour (2020). Miracles draws on recordings originally captured in a 2018 audio/visual performance project based around surveillance footage—a precursor to video-capped, monitor-based horizons that soon took on new meanings. Re-immersing himself in this material, Gowdy disassembles and deploys the source material for new experiments with vactrols, noise gates and analog-to-digital triggering and aliasing, the original recordings then juxtaposed anew amidst these successive textural and rhythmic treatments. Gowdy keeps this re-composition process stripped down, elemental and purposive, guided by an ascetic synthesis as sublation. Where Therapy With Colour was rigorously a set of stereo live performances, Miracles fuses iterative—though still spartan—layers of performance. “Therapy With Colour was about healing through self-hypnosis; Miracles is about forging a future with memory through subjection to trigger mechanisms” says Gowdy. The result is a captivating collection of minimal IDM and oscillated electronics, working primarily in a 120-140 BPM zone of tonal percussion and corrugated pulse. Gowdy’s sensibility and sound palette gets deeper and dirtier, summoning new pathways of grainy transcendence and abraded euphoria, each component in the mix heated and heightened to an unornamental and earnest form of mantric-industrial majesty: live, corporeal, activated electronic music of the highest caliber, deployed with monastic and meditative focus.