2021 has so far has felt a bit slim on the albums front but also most of my favourite releases are more obscure than usual, so I've resolve to start a few threads to hype some of the albums I've particularly loved.
I really enjoyed Max in the World's 'Drums of the East River' last year - a charming percussive ambient album vaguely in the style of Arp, Contours et. al. - but this 2021 album is something else again.
Love the concept: made as a soundtrack to an exhibition, this music is still broadly ambient, but it's specifically intended to be ambient which shadows clubbing music and pays tribute to it. I think Max's own press copy captures it better than I could:
"In November 2020, I collaborated with IRL Gallery on a sound installation called Club Chrysalis.
The idea behind Club Chrysalis came to me on the bike ride home from my first visit to the gallery. Upon hearing the formidable sound system owners Chris and Alice had secured for the space, I realized it had been months since I’d experienced the full body sounds - subs, arpeggiators, enveloping pads - that were such a big part of my life before the pandemic. I wondered if the space might offer an opportunity to free these sounds for an evening. I immediately went to work on the piece, which I thought of as a meditation on what might happen to the sounds of the club when the club goes to sleep.
Without the gravitational center of the dance floor, these sounds are unmoored: kicks and hi hats hit once before floating off, the familiar voices that had sung to us ecstatically appear to be exiting to another dimension. Classic tracks are manipulated to the edge of recognizability, and giants of the form - Theo Parrish, Terre Thaemlitz - offer frank commentary on the club and its music.
There’s a single photo from the evening: pink light colors a foggy room, masked guests are seated in rows, all facing two black monoliths where a deep shade of blue has emerged. It’s clear some kind of ritual is taking place. Listening back, the piece strikes me as an elegy for something deeply loved, a requiem for communal listening, a performance of last rites so something new can emerge.
As we begin to feel hope about the return of collective music experiences, I felt it was important to preserve this music for posterity."
The sampled voices of Theo and Terre perhaps over-determine my reference points here but this does remind me a lot of both artists, in particular the most becalmed/astral moments in DJ Sprinkles productions (the sampled talking does add to this resemblance); and even more so perhaps early Jan Jelinek (e.g. the Gramme album). Most of all I love its spectral warmth, it really does sound like club-lullaby music, or an amniotic bubble bath.
― Tim F, Sunday, 20 June 2021 09:48 (two years ago) link