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Blackest Ever Black
Dalhous 'Visibility Is A Trap' Vinyl LP
£8.99
Blackest Ever Black
Dalhous 'Visibility Is A Trap' Vinyl LP
£8.99
Visibility Is A Trap is the new EP by Dalhous, comprised of four originals together with a masterfully understated Regis remix of He Was Human And Belonged With Humans'. The EP heralds the arrival of the Edinburgh-based project's sophomore album, Will To Be Well, due out on Blackest Ever Black in early Summer 2014.
Dalhous first announced its existence in 2012 with the Mitchell Heisman 10', and last year released its debut full-length: An Ambassador For Laing.
Both Visibility Is A Trap and the upcoming Will To Be Well LP reflect writer-producer Marc Dall's continued interest in the language and imagery of self-help, R.D. Laing and the anti-psychiatry movement. Though recorded after Will To Be Well, the tracks on Visibility Is A Trap at first appear to have more in common with the blue ethereal drift of Ambassador.
While Information Is Forever'and A Change Of Attitude'are firmly in the ambient mode, Active Discovering'fizzes with arpeggiated energy, and a battery of percussion disrupts the calm surface of Sight Of Hirta'. Something is up. All is not as it seems.
The Regis remix of Ambassador highlight He Was A Human And Belonged With Humans'finds Karl O'Connor in unusually pensive mood. In fact this near-beatless, dubwise version is unlike anything he has put his name to before.
Discarding the rhythmic skeleton of Dalhous's original, he gives their weeping saxophone more space to roam and resonate, adding off-beat, sleep-deprived keys, murmured vocal fragments and swells of sub-bass pressure.
It could be construed as a love letter to his former home in West Berlin; certainly it evokes and effortlessly updates the drugsick grandeur of later Neubauten or Low side 2.
Tracklisting:
1. Active Discovering
2. Information Is Forever
3. Sight Of Hirta
4. A Change Of Attitude
5. He Was Human And Belonged With Humans (Regis Version)
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His work is rooted in the use of acoustic instruments (wind, percussion, strings), but his special sensitivity to the timbral qualities of each instrument, and his deft blurring of them, results in a sound-world that is mysterious, amorphous and hallucinatory, full of suggestive shadows, creaks and whispers.
Informed by years of intensive listening to various types of free music, exploratory drug use and especially the 'irregular organic forms' of the Belgian countryside where he resides, van Luijk's process begins always with pure improvisation: music played in an intuitive, sensual way, without the employment of conscious technique.
He performs and overdubs each instrumental component himself, and out of this process micro-structures and loose arrangements emerge: the piece becomes an improvised composition. Over time he has evolved his own richly poetic musical language, full of allusions to drone, acid folk, classical, Musique concrète and jazz, but beholden to none.
Aura Legato is one of van Luijk's darker and more acutely psychedelic offerings: a work of profound interiority, but one that also conjures images of old Europe and fin-de-siècle decadence - dabblings in Thelema, the fog of the opium-den - and has earned comparisons to Third Ear Band, Nurse With Wound, Mirror and HNAS.
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Sold outFaith Coloccia and Alex Barnett return to Blackest Ever Black with their second duo album, Weld; working with synthesizers, affected vocals, raw electrical noise, field recordings, EVP techniques, tape manipulation and drum machines to create a music at once lucid and mystic. Its songs embody various experiential philosophies and objectives: searching for the sacred in the forgotten and supposedly useless; exploring the meaning of 'natural'; listening for the pulse of the ancient; using technology both to materialise memory and to dream a folklore for a future age.Visit product page →
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