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LP
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TNP 026LP
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Forging an idiosyncratic musical language, told through exotic rhythms and adventurous wordless vocal explorations, Deal is Fay's boldest work yet, moving further away from the pop signifiers of previous exploits. With an articulate minimalism, Deal flexes and shapes these elements to their maximum potential through vast spatial movements that evolve down unexpected paths. Compositional directions diverge through variations on a theme. The album's complex choral arrangements and daring structural ideas demonstrate a deft understanding of music foundation while departing into abstract possibilities outside of these standards. A conversational interplay between drum and voice is at the center, highlighting the human element. A loose, primal urgency guides these compelling and playful electronic compositions that favor intuitive sense perceptions over self-expression. The voice acts as a beacon throughout the record, leading the rhythms and arrangements towards their next move. Deal is music for movement, an active listening experience that feels narrative or visual, building tension and anticipation of where the piece will lead, and what will happen next. The album uses sparseness to its strength, with each note and drum hit sounding more potent and unexpected. Here you'll find soul, exhilaration, guts, humor, freedom, play, human's animalistic nature. With a willingness to embrace the potential for new music, Deal is a brave and different record that will reward listeners.
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LP
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TNP 014LP
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Two years after the release of her groundbreaking LP DIN, Fay re-emerges with her new exhilarating new masterwork, Deathwatch. Treading many of the signature avant-pop and rough-and-tumble R&B tropes first heard on DIN, Deathwatch expands the sonic palette, pushing elements of drone, no wave/post-punk, and dub higher into the mix. With a tight focus on exploring the physical within the realm of machine music, Deathwatch (like DIN) was conceived using the same process of editing and stitching sounds together visually without the help of sequencers or even a grid. While this is music made with computers, Fay's painstakingly unique process highlights the raw human element to her music, reflecting the blood, sweat, and pain expended throughout her addictive, unquantized rhythm explorations.
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LP
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TNP 004LP
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Exploring wild, new directions in body music, DIN, the debut LP from FAY is an absolutely stunning introduction with a pinpoint focus on retaining the physical within the realm of machine music. While clearly electronic in nature using synthetic sounds, there is a uniquely raw human element in her music that reflects the amount sweat, blood, and pain expended throughout the creation of DIN that makes it stand apart. The album's fractured, meticulously-composed sonic structures make nods to modern R&B, and feature looping vocal mantras, exotic rhythms (zouk, gamelan), bass music's pressurized subs, and musique concrète's time-disorienting arrangements. Balancing sounds both hypnotic and (sometimes deliberately) harsh, the resulting album is one with few reference points, shrouded in mystery -- a mystery that only deepens and intrigues upon closer listen, even as the music and process unveils itself. The cover art for DIN demonstrates how the record was edited and stitched together, visually. Each sound was placed, not in a grid or sequence, but its distance in time from the others is measured by visual space. Rhythm is central throughout DIN. Separated by clanging percussion, album opener "How It Feels Good" feels like episodes, chapters or scenes on a theme. With the protagonist illustrated by the looped vocal, the song is driven by a thumping body drum, like an echoing heartbeat. The droning stop-start rhythm in "That's the Part" is a catharsis -- a void -- at which you move and nothing else is able to interrupt that movement. The frantic drum riddims of "Shadow I" are anchored by a steady pulse of sub-frequencies and a loopy, rapid-fire electric piano riff, while "Let It Go"'s stark, sinewy grooves may have you imagine Missy Elliott/Timbaland against John Cage's ethos of "getting rid of leaves to make trees visible." Ambitious and uncompromising, FAY's debut album maintains a human element and an unflinching commitment to minimalism and economy.
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