T. Gowdy
Therapy With Colour

"Listening to this record feels like getting your brain massaged... "Depse" feels like an ethereal shimmer, tickling the back of your head, and "No Wave II" satisfies like brushing a velvet pillow from its light side to its dark counterpart. "Up CTRL" swoops you into a factory of sound, tapping with sewing machine precision and undulating upon the winding belts of the synth. T. Gowdy is clearly a master of his craft, having predestined a place for every sound in every moment." – Exclaim!

"This is a beautiful record, relishing the curves and tactile joys of its materials as a priority… The sounds are a delight to hold in the head; beachball-buoyant and vividly three dimensional, suspended within the echoes of modest and unassuming spaces, ornamented in synthesizer harmonies that cover the record’s surface like lichens. Elegance is the key, and Therapy With Colour manages to guide me toward richer states of consciousness without seeming to try." – ATTN:Magazine

"Disparate sounds are gradually lured into the carefully constructed framework, threading these elements into a well-weaved electronic ride… Perhaps this does, in fact, mirror therapeutic practice. Gowdy gradually returns us time and time again to the same themes, to the same ground, to the same landscape, slowly peeling back individual layers in order to experience it once more but from a different perspective. Until that which you thought that you knew becomes something glaringly different from what you initially believed." – Echoes and Dust

"Therapy With Colour bristles with vivacity and effervescent energy, densely-packed with washes of sounds and pulses… Metronomic and quasi-Motorik rhythms throb away throughout the five tracks as various synth lines intertwine and deviate away from one another like brain waves coming in and out of focus. It’s a blissful work which aims to soothe rather than smother, invigorate rather than infiltrate." – Beats Per Minute

"Listening to this album is an adventure that can be likened to a journey beyond consciousness... Its techno rhythms, more suggested than imposed, make it a work that is aimed less at dancefloors than at our dancing neurons, which emerge soothed." – PAN M 360

Therapy With Colour is the Constellation debut by Montréal-based producer and sound artist T. Gowdy, who has released three prior albums of exquisitely textured, predominantly ambient electronic music (most recently Pachira Aquatica via Shimmering Moods Records in 2019). His sublime audio/visual performances have featured at MUTEK (Montréal and Barcelona) and Spektrum (Berlin), alongside his ongoing work as an in-demand producer/engineer with over fifty album credits to date, including Suuns (Secretly Canadian), Ensemble (Fat Cat) and Ada Lea (Saddle Creek) to name just a few.

Therapy With Colour is Gowdy’s most sonically and conceptually acute solo work to date, inspired by experiments with the Nova Pro 100 Light and Sound Mind Machine (among the best-known home hypnosis “mind machine” devices, first released in the late 1990s). For Gowdy, the ritualized therapeutic reprogramming of consciousness that this technology purports to effect has two primary personal dimensions: “to explore psychological ‘debiasing’ and decorrelation of heteronormative narratives that exist within my familial, intimate and economic relationships; to let flow neutral communication with the self and others” and to circumvent the technical biases and temporal blockages endemic to digital audio workstations and the computer-based editing that governs production of most electronic music. The album’s five tracks are extracted from live, linear, real-time stereo recordings that have their origins in an audio/visual collaboration between Gowdy and light artist Laura Buckley (whose scanner artwork features on the album cover and packaging).

The music on Therapy With Colour is indeed meditative, but in a resolutely contemporary and highly engaging way. These tracks steer clear of gauzy New Age tropes, slow-moving drone, or environmental music. Consistent with theories of “mind machine” brainwave synchronization, they involve techno-adjacent pulse and rhythm that reward active listening, while working co-equally as dissociative concentration music. Each of the five songs has a distinct vibe but constitute a deeply satisfying and cohesive flow. From the day Gowdy dropped this record on us a few months ago, devoid of context or background notes, we’ve probably listened to it more than anything else – not realizing we’d been self-medicating. But we can see everything so much more clearly now.

Thanks for listening.

TRACKLIST

01 Therapy With Colour
02 Depse
03 Up CTRL
04 No Wave II
05 Excavating Air

Running time: 00:28:21

PACKAGING NOTES

Deluxe LP is a 180gram pressing on midnight ultrablack vinyl in 20pt paperboard jacket with satin UV varnish and audiophile black paper poly-lined dust sleeve with a 12” x 24” art print poster on 160m uncoated archival paper. Inside of jacket and back side of poster printed in cyan blue. Scanner artwork by Laura Buckley. Includes DL card.

CD comes in a custom mini-gatefold 20pt paperboard jacket with satin UV varnish and inner dust sleeve for the disc (not pictured). Scanner artwork by Laura Buckley.

CREDITS

“My work is less about the outcome than it is a transformation. I am interested in communicating the feeling of suspension, a bridge through space. Nothing is able to touch in this space but there is a shared feeling of connection through disorientation.” – T. Gowdy

Recording and mixing: T. Gowdy
Mastering: José Leonardo Pupo D.
Artwork: Laura Buckley
Graphic design: Ian Ilavsky