|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Cassette
|
|
SOD 144CS
|
$12.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 8/7/2026
Josh Mason's new collection, Wave Salt +7, emerges from an oblique origin. Unearthed from a dormant hard drive, it documents a set of work sessions only partially recoverable, their original continuity and intent fractured by time and technical failure. What remains is a constellation of mercurial gestures that proves, against all odds, to be entirely consonant with Mason's ongoing musical concerns. In a sense, the very condition of partiality proves generative, with elision operating on multiple levels -- structural, sonic, and archival -- shaping both the music itself and the circumstances of its (re)appearance. Phrases surface only to be truncated or displaced, hovering at the edge of resolution, and transitions are implied rather than fully enacted. Absence functions not as a deficit, but as an important compositional resource. Central to the album's sound is a distinctive use of vocoding. Deployed not to simulate vocal presence but as a tool for tonal sculpting, it yields a shifting lattice of smeared harmonics, angular melody, and attenuated noise. Sounds are pressed through one another, their edges softened, shifted, or selectively erased, producing surfaces simultaneously articulated and porous. Rather than reconstructing a lost whole, the album posits a mode of listening attuned to gaps, interruptions, and unstable forms. Even so, in keeping with Mason's broader practice, this music remains grounded in melodic logic and a distinctly human scale, ensuring that its fragmentary structures register not solely as experiments, but as expressions of proximity and feeling.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
Book
|
|
GF 012BK
|
115 pages. Hardcover. Each book contains a QR code for a direct album download and stream. The third release in Greyfade's FOLIO format -- a full-length music edition in hardcover book form -- is Josh Mason's Kicking A Dark Horse. For his Greyfade debut, musician and sound artist Josh Mason presents an ambitious multi-modal work articulated across sound and text: a nine-track electronic album alongside a book-length work of experimental writing. Across both forms, Kicking A Dark Horse is governed by controlled instability -- chaotic structures that cohere without repetition and evolve without resolution. The text unfolds in fragments -- part diary, part landscape study, part fever dream -- extending the disjunctive, textural logic of the music into literary terrain rarely inhabited by a music edition.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
SOD 134LP
|
Since the early 2010s, Josh Mason has slowly amassed an enchanting discography, publishing recordings on labels such as Florabelle, Dauw, Longform Editions, and his retired Sunshine Ltd. imprint. Whether focusing on electric guitar or modular synthesizer, Mason approaches his music with intentionality, tenderness, and a keen ear for detail, resulting in an exceptional and enduring oeuvre. His workmanlike approach to craft and monomaniacal interest in circuit design culminated in 2021's Utility Music, a daunting book/CD project that documents and unpacks a yearlong exploration of a Doepfer A-100 Eurorack system. The irony of such a project is that it might lead listeners to believe that academic technique and synthesis technology are the animating principles of his practice, but the reality is that this is only part of the story. Listening to Mason's music one gets the sense that, like a good novelist, he truly cares about his characters, which take the forms of the textures and timbres of archaic wavetable oscillators, idiosyncratic filters, pulverized samples, and exotic noise sources. An Anxious Host feels like a pivotal release in Mason's catalog. It's his first vinyl outing since 2019's astounding Coquina Dose, and it may be the most succinct and potent album he's made. The track titles function like stage directions in a play, intimating a hazy, filmic narrative populated by schemers, dreamers, and lost souls. As ever with Mason's work, place is paramount, and this record is thoroughly shot through with the humidity, warmth, and "end of the line"-ness of the state of Florida. Seasick swells and sunken melodies; swampy, sputtering loops; sonic flotsam pooling together and flowing out, beckoning the listener to come have a soak. Edition of 300; includes download code.
|
|
|
|