|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
LP
|
|
TTR 022LP
|
The central theme of Steady is perseverance. Each track is based on a personal story or a fleeting encounter with people these past few years, from close friends to total strangers, either at home or on night shift commutes. People navigating their own hardships, almost giving up but always struggling through. More broadly, it's about multiplicity, and contradiction. These central figures displaying hope and determination within a city of development and neglect, uniformity and chaos -- an unfiltered representation of a city with all its jagged edges, darkness, and shards of light. It's broken and disheveled, but never not beautiful, just like the people in it. Musically, Steady continues where Bleach (Hyperdawn's debut album) (THEMTHERE 013LP, 2019) left off -- a sonic language of glitch, decaying tape and analogue distortion through which hints of RnB and soulful ballads bleed through. With a greater emphasis on beats, albeit lopsided on pitch-shifted tape loops, Steady feels more self-assured, more confident, more recognizable. At the same time, it's never stable or predictable -- choruses break down early, harmonies bend into beating microtones, tracks emerge before others have finished. The symphonic scope of Bleach is still retained in Steady though. This is music of motivic development, of micro and macro form, of meticulous refining. The work of two classically trained composers, the album's chaos is heavily considered and carefully shaped. Hours of improvisation sessions have since been painstakingly refined into ten distilled tracks, owing to Steady's three-year gestation.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
THEMTHERE 013LP
|
Hyperdawn are Salford-based experimentalists Michael Cutting and Vitalija Glovackyte. Off the back of their prolific individual projects, ranging from multimedia performances to studio releases, orchestral works to solo live sets, the duo has steadily developed a distinctive voice as Hyperdawn, forging modified keyboards, homemade instruments, and reel-to-reel tape recorders. Their debut album, Bleach, takes their physical, process-based aesthetic with imperfections of warped tape and faltering hardware and pushes it towards the boundaries of pop music. Hints of verse-chorus structures are now apparent with the use of Vitalija's voice as an essential introduction, giving the duo's rough grained instrumentals a new level of poignancy. While the reel to reel machines provide the album's characteristic sound, this isn't music for the analog purist. Digital processes have their place here, countering the warmth of valve amplifiers with glitchy pitch-bending effects, matching un-quantized tape loops with high frame-rate playback. Bleach displays a delicate balance between new and old, skeletal and substantial, rigor and recklessness. The result is a broken pop music borne out of hours of improvisations and experimentation that feels at once completely foreign and entirely familiar. Ambiguous textures and structures are contextualized by Vitalija's confident vocal delivery. Beats are left off-kilter, intonation is approximate, while clicks and pops protrude over decaying instrumentals, suggesting music that is already disintegrating in time.
|