ARTIST: Long Distance Poison
ALBUM: Technical Mentality
to be released on 1/31/20 on Hausu Mountain

hausumountain.bandcamp.com/album/technical-mentality

Long Distance Poison is the Brooklyn-based ambient/drone synth duo of Nathan Cearley and Erica Bradbury. Technical Mentality, their third release on Hausu Mountain, follows Lama Nada (HAUSMO40, 2015) and Knock Magh (HAUSMO75, 2018), and joins a catalog of releases on labels like Constellation Tatsu, and Ecstatic Peace!, Deep Distance. The album continues the duo’s exploration of extended, transportive synth sessions sculpted from Cearley’s modular systems and Bradbury’s keyboards and analog gear. While Lama Nada floated through thick passages of drone and Knock Magh jittered with discordant fragments of sub-oceanic foley, Technical Mentality presents swathes of nearly empty space colored in piece by piece with slow-brooding chordal synth voices. The album highlights the specificity and fine-grain detail of the duo’s electronic tableaus, as each patch and understated melody receives its own room to swell and complicate against a desolate backdrop. Long Distance Poison generates tension and narrative flux by contrasting dissonant spreads of alien tone against moments of striking harmonic complexity. The textures on display range from smeared synthetic washes to crunched, distorted tones, to segments of glistening arpeggios that inch closer to the precedent of Berlin School synthesis. Drawing inspiration from the inhuman aesthetics of early computing technology as much as the beatific grandeur of nature, Long Distance Poison splits the difference between environmental world building and the cold, increasingly familiar internal architecture of the technological era.

Technical Mentality features two sidelong pieces that evolve through a network of distinct moods and levels of density. Slow vortices of standing tone swell into tiered lattices of chiming melody, as if to unearth some evidence of living tissue in the ruins of a future wasteland. Elements hit the mix that land somewhere between conventional notes and abstracted textures, blurring the line between implied harmonic systems and the pure act of gazing into the abyss. When the duo chooses to ramp up the level of activity and introduce attendant layers in the haze, they lock into rhythmic grids that sketch out slow chord progressions and fluctuating melodic patterns. At other moments, the tones they present seem to mimic timbres inherent to the industrial and digital eras: the whirring of machines at the end of a factory shift, the clustered tonal ring of a device in an empty room, the last wail of a dial up modem before its replacement. Long Distance Poison strips the notion of human-and-machine symbiosis of the discernible markers of instrumental performance. Instead, they present a hollowed out quasi-reality where only a spiritual afterimage of human presence remains.

Long Distance Poison - Giving Up On Me (excerpt)

A label run by Doug Kaplan and Max Allison. We operate out of Chicago, IL and release music on vinyl, on cassette tape, and digitally via Bandcamp.

It’s likely that we’ve never met, but we believe that all of the decisions you make as a person operating in this world are well-intentioned and correct in their own way and with that belief in our minds we’d like you to know how deeply we admire you.