As well as the physical records, CDs and cassettes you might have filling a wall or two at home, you’ve also undoubtedly accumulated various digital collections as well.
The music I like to have close to hand sits on my phone these days. A small collection that I always want with me, beyond the scope of Wi-Fi. A rolling boil of albums I’ve adored forever, imported from CD, cherry-picked from Bandcamp, promos under review, or the track listings for my Soniko mixes. A chunk of my phone’s capacity is a continual digital in-tray/out-tray of sonic delights.
Some music quickly comes and goes, whilst others become long-term fixtures.
Whilst lee’s first album, textures is released today – 14 October, it’s one we have been floating in since the artist shared their music with us back in July. 4 months, where this concise and broadly ambient 32-minute release has blossomed quickly and then repeatedly, into a series of richly psychedelic passages of sound.
Over 8 tracks, a sense of a coming together of what sounds like rudimentary recordings, imperfections, sonic artefacts, pedals, electronics, and instrumentation, all magically realigned into soaring illusionistic gateways and portals. The album begins with mantilija – thick saturated organ drones, swelling and growing. The elements here are somehow unfussy but knowingly overlapped – to give them a sense of motion, movement and glimpses of magic.
trickle is little more than a throb of energy, this time chopped to create a pulse of stroboscopic rhythm. Over 5 blissful minutes, the whole thing pivots, turning itself inside out in an impossibly animated standing wave. This is sublime inner space music, and the only tiny earth-based issue we have is that it’s not at least 4 times longer…
It’s clear though that lee has clearly tried to be succinct with textures. The following tracks swrl and twrl are both brief, barely minute-long swatches into huge hanging tapestries.
windstrm feels like a slice of something ancient and visceral, reimagined into bizarre futuristic bleeping forms. rnse is a mass of reflections that shape-shift between chopped rhythms and spluttering engines.
floating leaf dnz finally stretches towards the infinite with a 9-minute expanding drone. Layers blossom and decay in thick arcs that gather into a shimmering peak before receding into throbbing silence. The closer fragile is like a light beam shining into a darkness, cascading in distorted lens flares.
Time and again, we have effortlessly floated through this music. That sense this album somehow deliciously recognises that fine line between nothing and something. textures is a meditation on just that – the texture of sound, and how tiny variations engage your ears and brain like tactile surfaces.
lee’s approach feels like their concepts work in the treatments, the sounds don’t need to be much more than sonic material – recorded stuff – to be chopped and woven. This material is all that’s required to demonstrate how these surfaces change the characteristics. Murky, ambiguous, non-specific noises and tones all gently and skilfully reconfigured into ingenious scenarios, alien nightclubs, and huge voids of twinkly vast space. Even with its vague sleeve, hidden in amongst albums shouting far louder in my digital library, it’s the one I regularly head straight for…
textures is a lower-case release; it won’t fight for your time or attention one bit – but I’d encourage you to be curious – it’s brimming with the subtlest of heft and beauty.
textures is out now and available here
obladada.com 