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LP
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AF 020LP
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on the feet of a wind is a wild assemblage of carbonated synthetic music from Powell and a sister record to flash across the intervals (AF 018LP) and multiply the sides -- two albums already released in 2020. Recalling Xenakis, Parmegiani, and Hecker but with the smile/smirk of vintage Powell, the record is released via a folder, a new music and film platform created by Powell, Michael Amstad and Marte Eknæs that bundles up music, film, image, text and other forms of madness into folders that are shared/expanded online. The release is accompanied by a "Hi-sensitive" film directed by Amstad and Eknæs entitled "flares, currents". The film contains a recombined live version of "rise, world unfold", the musical series that concludes this album. a folder is a collection of disorienting works of experimental film, ambiguous texts, and other assorted media set to the most brazenly strange and formlessly mesmerizing musical structures of Powell's career. It's also a work of artistic assemblage, without fixed notions of time. Tarkovsky once described his filmmaking as "sculpting in time," and a folder exists in a similar kind of "zone;" it is a project continuously added to, subtracted from, abstracted, and injected into the glut of cyberspace like a slow-moving pathogen that refuses to be defined or categorized. Shunning titles in favor of oblique category markers, films like a?34 present a mosaic of images of biological forms and sublime landscapes set to super-synthetic, carbonated compositions. All of this signals an artist liberated from the confines of the narrow branding signifiers an electronic musician can find themselves in. While it is aware of its place in cyberspace, this project also connects to something primordial and awesome. "Xenakis talked about creating universes with sound," says Powell, "and we are all free to create our own worlds in life, art -- whatever. This is what happened to me in a way: I have been in this world for three years or something, and I don't really want to leave. The folder is a refuge. "Endlessly strange and formlessly mesmerizing" --The Quietus.
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LP
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AF 018LP
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Flash Across The Intervals is the first new Powell LP since 2016's Sport on XL Recordings, and the first music available physically since his 2018 collaboration with Turner-Prize winning artist Wolfgang Tillmans. Oscar (Powell) wanted it known that this is not intended as a definitive album, the realization/release of some bold new statement, a singular mark of identity or triumphant elucidation of years of valiant work. Rather, it is simply 35 minutes of music segmented from an overall flow of stuff, a variable torrent of hyper-synthetic composition brought about by entirely other things -- circumstances that relate in no way to a previous life led within an occasionally toxic bubble of taste, music, entertainment, and "community". As René Char once wrote, "No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions," and so it is that we can become bereft of courage, stripped of any enduring connection to our work, dissociated from many of the fragile and reactionary structures that previously held us up. When the illusion of reality dissolves around you, how can you not think as Leibniz once did: "We thought we had arrived at port, but found ourselves thrown back out on the open sea." It is easy to be molded by a contemporary space that leaves you with no possibility of creating anything at all; in a kind of zero state of expression that inevitably forces you to look elsewhere ➜ to pursue a Deleuzian line of escape out towards a horizon line that never draws closer. Here, at least, out on the waves, new cartographies can be traced and new connections formed. This "album" thus functions as a message in a bottle: cast from unknown coordinates, it maps some of these connections, not least in its close relationship with the visual work of Michael Amstad and Marte Eknæs (afolder.studio). Their imagery inflates this sleeve; the music inflates their films. What emerges from the fog is a luminous three-headed constellation of melodic lines in non-sensical interplay with one another. Here on record, spinning at a speed of your choosing and with eyes closed and no imagery to hand, the feeling persists of a deep decentering, music discontinuously carbonated by a different geography of relations, the depths of which this music begins to explore. Includes double-sided, four-panel printed insert; edition of 250.
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