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CD
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SAT 024CD
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Through dense layers of noise, brittle beats, found sounds, and a general haze, Francis Harris returns to his own Scissor & Thread imprint with the aid of frequent collaborator, and long-time friend, guitarist Gabe Hedrick, under the guise of Aris Kindt. Following Harris's 2014 sophomore solo album, Minutes of Sleep, (number-one in MOJO magazine's list of the 10 Best Electronica Albums of 2014), the duo's debut album, Floods, takes as its focus the late author W. G. Sebald's profound interpretation of Rembrandt's 1632 masterwork The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp in Sebald's acclaimed 1995 novel Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt (The Rings of Saturn). Floods is a sonic journey into the heart of the body, a bold rejuvenation of the corpse of Adriaan Adriaanszoon (Aris Kindt), the figure in Rembrandt's painting. Written during span of over a year using an 808, a modular Eurorack, and two guitars, Floods was mixed at Key Club Recording Company in late August 2015 with engineer Bill Skibbe. The album charts new territory for both Harris and Hedrick, melding a long history with electronic music and youthful love for indie noise and weaving in and out of near-silence and sheer walls of sound with a gentle and constant heartbeat at its core. The dream-like murk of opener "Now Grey" sets the tone with thick pads, distant ghostly guitar work, and fragmented drums. On the title-track, dubby chords set the tone as subdued toms amble forward with a crackle of fire nearby; dense sounds echo and swirl around into a climactic frenzy. "Blue Sky Shoes" hypnotizes with its submerged strings and subaquatic patterning, as synths rain down. "Snowbird" builds into a repressed fury as a blizzard of toms bounces around a heavy layer of noise while a morose, longing string arrangement emerges from despair into an ethereal moment. "Every New Thing" dives deep again into murky waters with entrancing drums and warped guitar lines swirling around like sirens. "Embers," with its quiet demeanor, slowly builds to an enlightened peak, while the closing track, "Braids," generates a shoegaze fog of churning guitar work and dense noise as the sound of children swinging drifts in and out, as if trying desperately to recover a fragmented memory of lost time.
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