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2LP
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WCEC 011LP
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Following his 2014 releases as Bass Clef for PAN and Alter, London-based musician Ralph Cumbers presents Bliss Abyss, a double-LP of new material under his Some Truths alter ego. Bringing together strands of house, techno, fractured rhythm, and anthemic modular synthesis, the album demonstrates Cumbers' vision as one of experimental music's most singular voices. As he adeptly distills strands of the familiar and abstract into a series of tonal and percussive collages, Cumbers effortlessly navigates the balance between stark, functional electronics and playful, psychedelic humor, molding contorted, evolving structures and tense shards of rhythm into oscillating synthetics and expansive dubbed-out comas. Bliss Abyss highlights Cumbers' position as an artist embedded in the lineage of British pioneering synthesis, while filtering these technological and esoteric histories through a razor-sharp dancefloor sensibility and a defiant ear for intricate construction and dynamics. At the center of the production process for Bliss Abyss is the rhythmic vista opened up by a Eurorack modular system and a repaired Roland TR606 drum machine. Using this combination, Cumbers recorded onto 25 tapes and then repeatedly recorded over them, creating imperfect palimpsests as sound leaked through from layers of previous recordings. This sits as the percussive bedrock for an exploration of acoustic modelling, and the uncanny potential for synthesis to both mimic and depart from the real.
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