MIXED SIGNALS II represents the next chapter of Fax and Braulio Lam’s collaboration, which started with their first EP in 2020. Across four tracks, they navigate creative exploration, and wander among the textures, colors, and sizes that sound can possess. 
  
Much like its predecessor MIXED SIGNALS, the sequel EP delivers a meditative ambient swirl, dedicated to finding balance while still moving. And yet, if the first album was to be considered grounded and earthy, MIXED SIGNALS II is determined to challenge gravity—it creates spacious cinematic landscapes that stretch out and up.  

The four tracks are distinctive in their progression: The airy subtleties of the field recordings in ”Fragmented” take off and open up into an expanse of drone, with echoes of feedback further off in the distance. “Porta” twinkles in a dark sky; it wavers slightly in a liminal space of gradual transformation. In “Visions”, there is a hypnotic revelation, with an underlying heartbeat that gently draws one into its ascent. Finishing with the title track, “Mixed Signals II” is a docking; it rotates as it revolves, slowly considering what lies beyond its own orbit. 

This meditative soundtrack is like a hazy black and white image, captured by a telescope or transmitted by a satellite, hinting at what lies far beyond our own limits of perception. The arrangement of acoustic instruments and electric guitars layer with field recordings and synthesizers to create a hypnotic reflection on sound—how it reaches out in the space around it, how it rises, how it looks, and how it feels.  

MIXED SIGNALS II was recorded between Tijuana and Mexicali, in Mexico by musicians Braulio Lam and Ruben Tamayo (a.k.a. Fax). Together, the artists built upon their first collaboration to pass beyond the horizon of instrumental music.

Mixed Signals II

Fax + Braulio Lam —  Visions

Glåsbird’s travelogue of sound advances further, with this seventh edition in the series heading to warmer, more exotic climes. The A Sonic Expedition series is this anonymous artist’s armchair exploration of the world around us and it has to date put down roots in Greenland, Svalbard, Norway, Novaya Zemlya, Siberia and the Himalayas. With this latest excursion, the snowy, treacherous peaks of Everest are traded for the tropically vast Pacific Ocean.

As fans of the artist will already be aware, Glåsbird researches each geographic location with great intrigue and fascination, scouring Google Earth satellite imagery, watching documentaries, reviewing vintage maps and reading articles about its history and culture. Whilst the enormity of this ocean was obvious from looking at the globe, what became apparent was the scale of diversity across the thousands of islands in the region, whether it be the landscapes, culture or even the rare species of bird. Studying history revealed some dark tales, of challenging sea voyages, crocodiles and even cannibalism. As always, it also gave the artist opportunity to make new discoveries, such as how atolls are formed from ancient volcanoes and theories on how the Moai of Easter Island were moved across the landscape.

Glåsbird felt that their now signature modern classical style needed to change for this record, as these ambient portraits of the Pacific offer surely the most adventurous sound to date from this artist. Percussive rhythms were carved out of cheap percussion instruments, exotic polyrhythms glisten alongside sounds of rolling ocean waves and the thriving nature scenes. Sun bleached tape decays atop warm, ebbing bass and synth tones.

In Pacifica, Glåsbird traces a set route from one island to the next, marked by each track on the album. It begins with a view of La Perouse Pinnacle from inside the French Frigate Shoals. This pillar of rock has been known to cause shipwrecks and general confusion amongst seafarers who’d mistaken it for a ship when seen from distance. The journey continues many miles of sea south, to the triangular shaped Kingman Reef before heading off to explore the lake in the middle of Washington Island, also known as Teraina. The journey heads a long way across the ocean in an easterly direction, to the Galápagos Islands and then onto the remote Easter Island, home of the Moai stones. The next leg of the journey returns in a westerly direction, arriving at Mangareva which is the main part of the Gambier Islands. The French Polynesian paradise island of Bora Bora follows, before a stop at the small wooded island of Tafahi in Tonga. Inyeug, the most northerly island of Vanuatu is the next destination, famed for Queen Elizabeth II’s visit back in 1974. The tempo of the percussive loops notches up a little, as the next track represents the Solomon Islands and then this tour ends on the island of Yap, with echoes of Yapese rituals and lapping ocean waves closing the final piece which is called Rumung.

Credits:
Written and produced by Glåsbird
Mastered by James Edward Armstrong
Art and design by Andrew Heath

Cover photography by Garth Rogers in 1969, licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
license.

pacifica

wlr131 Glåsbird - Pacifica

Tobira

Nijiriguchi

Monkou

Okurirei

Mukaemizu

Roji

Tsukubai

this is a very similar patch as Untitled VI, except that now there are three voices instead of one: SMR, piston honda (which is also in the rosie efx loop from time to time, which is a bad habit/crutch that i lean on way too often) and e350. SMR is droning and fluttering into clouds, while the piston honda and e350 are both hitting an optomix before going into rings for some reverb. there is also a field recording churning in the background inside the disting, which i am randomly and manually controlling the playback speed on. 

i could listen to this for hours (and did)

Untitled VII

Aquaeductus vestibuli

Esperanza

With over 100 physical releases since its inception by Taylor Deupree in 1997, New York-based music label 12k has decisively defined and developed the concept of minimalism in the realms of electronic music for more than a decade. Fusing elements from Ambient and Electro-Acoustic Composition with carefully arranged digital textures and associative micro-noises, the label's aesthetics revolve around a precisely-outlined, yet deeply emotional concoction of the technological and the organic. Eschewing the typical marketing mechanisms of the commercial music industry, Deupree has sculpted a platform whose influence today extends well beyond the confinements of the experimental community. 12k's integral approach, in which the label's instantly recognizable, elegantly spartan artwork enters into an inseparable symbiosis with the music, has created a timeless audiovisual language respected and appreciated all over the world.

Roji

12k

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