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LP
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ELP 048LP
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Primitive World mines obscure and vibrant paths on this strong new LP for Ecstatic, inspired once again by the forgotten sci-fi novels of Lawrence Durrell and finding a curious lane somewhere between Alva Noto and cubist UK funky rhythms. Throwing himself into bouts of taut, fractious, and probing electronics on his sophomore LP, The Revolt Of Aphrodite, Sam Wills uses the same palette as found on his White On White (ELP 033LP, 2018) -- PPG Wave, Kurzweil K250, Emulator 4, and Lexicon 224 -- albeit with a finer manipulation of form. Oscillating between the Alva Noto/Anne-James Chaton-esque minimalism of "All This Vulgar Data", to the cubist UK funky rhythms in "Iolanthe Dances" and Dego-like broken beats in "Skins Plastered With White Lead", you end up in the curdled electronic sensuality on "The Foetus Of a Love Song" which gives the album a deftly imaginative and playful dimension that stands in contrast to the homogeneity of much of modern electronic music's all-too-often blinkered dreams. Following a similar process that was applied to the visual cues of overlooked British constructivist Marlow Moss in his 2018 debut, and recent lysergic rescoring of Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987), Sam Willis employs a strategy of in/direct references to Durrell's seminal '60s sci-fi diptych The Revolt of Aphrodite -- comprising the novels Tunc and Nunquam -- in an absorbing re-imagining of its scenes, rendered in a mix of electronic shrapnel, craftily disrupted UK club rhythms, and stuttering vocaloids. The original books' themes of "Nietzschean psycho-sexual satire", and their acerbic, bawdy, densely allusive text, serve to push Primitive World toward more complex drum programming/editing and a finer spectrum of timbres in order to best transpose the stories into music. Set against a backdrop of the May 1968 general strike in Paris, the books address notions of multiplicity and contingency, and a preoccupation with structure and "cause and effect" that Primitive World reflects in the music's mazy narration and his poetic embrace of literary/musical license. Where modern electronic music too often arrives at the same aesthetic conclusions inspired by iconic work from William Gibson or Asimov, Durrell's influence provides something altogether new to the absorbingly otherworldly. RIYL: Alva Noto, Dego, Russel Haswell. Cover painting by Daniel John Willis; Photo by Sam Willis, design by Alessio Natalizia. Cut at Dubplates & Matering, Berlin. Edition of 300.
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LP
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ELP 033LP
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White On White is an absorbingly dynamic, multi-layered album of improvisations made on the seminal PPG Wave synth, inspired by the work, life, and theories of the great, if forgotten, British constructivist artist Marlow Moss (1889-1958): a radical, gender-bending British Jewish lesbian and innovator of non-figurative art who was a then-contemporary influence on Piet Mondrian, with whom she worked alongside from the late 1920s as part of the Abstraction-Creation artists association in Paris, until the Nazi's forced her from mainland Europe back to England, where she settled in the far west of Cornwall. White On White forms a follow-up of sorts to Sam Willis's Ascention tape (2015), and perhaps more aptly, leads on from his and Alessio Natalizia's reworks of Daphne Oram -- arguably another overlooked, British female pioneer of her field - which are collected on their Walls album, Sound Houses (ELP 005LP, 2014). There's little doubt that this is some of Willis's strongest solo work, which can be attributed to the fecund inspiration of Moss's work, life, and theories, as well as his access to a prized arsenal of rare vintage synths. Titled after the Moss piece which adorns the LP's front cover, White On White forms a welcome first introduction for many to Moss through a combination of visual representations -- photographs of the artist and her work -- with text by Lucy Howarth, curator of Moss's recent exhibitions at Museum Haus Konstruktiv exhibition (2017), the touring Tate display (2013-15), and of course the music itself, which seeks to describe Moss's mathematically sound geometries and evocative aesthetics through its lattice of unique, free-floating timbres and spatialized rhythm patterns. White On White is thus a direct result of the artist immersing himself in Moss's oeuvre, or what is left of it (most of her pre-WWII output was destroyed in the war), with results strongly reflective of the austere clarity and modernist structure of her works, from her syncopated line drawings modeled in the helixes of "Double Line", to the rotating perspectives of her 2D-into-3D metal sculpture manifest in the illusive, Peder Mannerfelt-like designs of "Matrix Of The Visible", whereas the closing nine minutes of perilous abstraction recalling Wendy Carlos's Clockwork Orange OST in "Man Guessed At A Spiritual Meaning And Imposed A Moral System" both literally and metaphorically serves a sort of unsentimentally elegiac, enigmatic lament for the artist's neglected status. RIYL: Oneohtrix Point Never's Good Time OST, Peder Mannerfelt's brut ambient, Rashad Becker's lysergic sound designs.
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12"
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ACRE 037EP
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Primitive World's music lurks in the shadows of the weirder, experimental side of the dancefloor -- juddering bass, knocking kick drums, dropouts and pops and scuzzy, fizzing synth lines alongside the jacking percussion. Think Morton Subotnick meets Marshall Jefferson -- this is house musique concrète.
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