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LP
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KRANK 210LP
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2017 release. "Michigan trumpeter Justin Walter's solo work centers on evocative, intuitive explorations of the EVI (Electronic Valve Instrument), a rare wind-controlled analog synthesizer from the 1970s. Its unique, smeared tonality allows for an expressive range of glassy, jazz-like textures, which Walter loops and layers with hushed electronics and twilit trumpet, painting opaque landscapes of resonant beauty. Walter's 2013 debut, Lullabies & Nightmares, included a handful of collaborations with percussionist Quin Kirchner, but Unseen Forces finds him fully solo, refining the project to its essence: shape-shifting watercolors of pastel haze, lit by the soft synthetic glow of electric breath. It's a sound both modern and timeless, fusing emotion and technology, gauze and melody, force and fragility."
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LP
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KRANK 237LP
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"The music of Justin Walter veers between nebulous and numinous, coaxed from the translucent tonalities of his signature instrument, the EVI (Electronic Valve Instrument). Destroyer, his latest, and third for Kranky, marks his most multifaceted work yet. Inspired by minimalistic urges (evading grandiosity, condensing scope, embracing spatial restraint) tempered with the drama of triptychs (becoming, destruction, aftermath), the album's eleven tracks thread a keening suite of aching, opaque beauty, traced in absence and breath. First begun in the the no man's land summer of 2020, Walter gradually amassed nearly two hours of demos, drafts, and ideas, then steadily whittled them to their essence. Destroyer enlists the sounds of a recently restored pump organ, adding pulses and quaking texture, but otherwise the album is a shimmering showcase of the EVI: miasmic, melodic, intuitive, infinite. It's music of fraught devotion and uneasy peace, questing yet languorous, forever rapt and untethered."
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CD
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KRANK 179CD
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"'Though the album title Lullabies and Nightmares suggests music thematically rooted in sleep, the debut full-length from Brooklyn-based/Michigan-bred trumpet player and composer Justin Walter owes more to a sense of emerging. After years of touring, random gigs and session work as a gifted player, Walter emerged with a sound that rendered all of that almost inconsequential. Spending a couple years intensively exploring the EVI, or Electronic Valve Instrument, a 1980's synthesizer/horn hybrid, he eventually worked out webs of bubbling loops made on the instrument, processed trumpet and fragmented electronics. Following a few low-key cassette releases and solo loft performances, Walter took the project into the studio, working with Erik Hall and drummer Quinn Kirchner to create a more controlled statement. Building on the loops and textures of the EVI, the album incorporates phasing patterns, the occasional motoric churn of dubbed out drums and considerate passages of trumpet improvisation, calling on Walter's years of experience as an improviser. Longer pieces are bridged by truncated interludes, wandering between modes that are by turns spooky, restless and sublime. The nightmares are there, with dissonance and panic on the heels of redemption in almost every song, but they're there only to be awoken from. The lullabies pass by quickly, too. The album moves naturally through its meditative cycles in a constant state of emergence.' -- Fred Thomas -- Presenting the debut album from longtime Nomo member Justin Walter. If this was a vintage Nonesuch label release, it would come with some dry title such as Music for Electronics, Trumpet, EVI and Percussion. The recordings here are anything but dry, instead being an exhilarating interface of the human and machine."
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LP
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KRANK 179LP
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