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Beginning with 2012’s Leland New York artist Francis Harris has been doing a deep dive into the sonic swells and contrapuntal granularities that articulate our most abstract, and sometimes slowest moving, virtualities. Through found sound, analog synthesis, and concise instrumentation Harris has delivered works that transcend the diagrammatic exposition often found in electronic music in an attempt to redraw the landscape of how such music is received and understood. Rather than valorize the fragment, the ambient, even in some cases the song, Harris’s albums offer networks of complex interiorities that endeavor to act as whole worlds unto themselves replete with memory, possibility, loss, and a radiant albeit tenuous hopefulness for the future. 

While previous albums, most notably Leland and Minutes of Sleep (2014) as well as two albums released as one half of the duo Aris Kindt (most notably the stellar Swann and Odette from 2017) have relied on singular thematic and narrative drives that were often of a personal, collaborative, or hermetic in nature, Thresholds is an album that aspires to sonic universality and the presentation of a fully formed psychoacoustical world. That being said it is not an “album of ideas”. Inspired by the ecological and political upheavals of the present and the role of speculative thought as an avenue of global transformation Thresholds is the work of a mature artist fully in control of his powers. Both expansive and nuanced the album widens the aperture of the affective possibilities of the electronic assemblage; themes skip from one track to the next, elevating and informing each other in tangible fields of abstract figuration. The titles, while often heady, concisely allude to strategies implicit in the construction and arrangement of the works: Cut Up, within the context of the album, is exactly that. Luck Takes a Step juxtaposes stately synths with just the right touch of playful fluctuation and latent atonality. The title track itself is a knotted mass of uncertainty and propulsive beats the breakdown of which is a nervous series of fits and starts that resonate not just within the track but as the fulcrum of the entire album: the threshold of our Threshold: 

“…we are caught up in our own original transversals of time to the point of dissolution, and that which remains a part of the contrivance of ourselves is ultimately that which crosses the threshold and is somehow, miraculously, reconstituted on the other side of it. Because it is via the threshold that we can best observe the conditions of experience as lived even as we cross to the other side of understanding, rejoining the ancient equilibriums of which we, in our depths, are comprised.” (From the liner notes) 

No track overstays its welcome and with the help of standout vocalist Eliana Glass, and instrumentation by Dave Harrington, Mark Nelson (Pan American), Will Shore, Greg Paulus and Gareth Redmond, and mixed by Phil Weinrobe, the result is a dizzyingly pure inward gaze that is first and foremost an album about connection.

Thresholds

On That Occasion, Landeau

Francis Harris - On That Occasion, Landeau

Speculative Nature Of Purposive Form

Francis Harris - Speculative Nature Of Purposive Form

Francis Harris - Thresholds

And Everything Is One Thing After Another

Francis Harris - And Everything Is One Thing After Another

Sludging up since 20 something or other... ™

Methods of Dance on LYL 22.02

Ethereal soundscapes for this month's Fistfight in the garden of earthly delights. Dive in ~

See all shows & tracklists at https://bit.ly/3o0hdMz

Fistfight in the Garden of Earthly Delights w/ 4142 - 10th May 2022

For October's edition of The Ransom Note Dispatch on Netil Radio, Matt Cowell was joined by Not An Animal Records for two hours of that good stuff...

The Ransom Note Dispatch w/ Not An Animal on Netil Radio (Oct 22)

01. FAR EAST FLIGHT - FAR EAST FLIGHT (Black Seed Karakorum Remix)
02. Yuto Takei - Kerr Former
03. A-Tweed - Egyptian Ring (Rambal Cochet’s Turtle Trance Mix)
04. AJO - Zazen (II) (Tassilo Vanhöfen Remix)
05. Jokios Kultūros - Crouching Tiger (Tassilo’s Vision Serpent)
06. Tadan - Initiation (Tassilo Vanhöfen Sativa Remix)
07. Tassilo Vanhöfen - Paradise Lost
08. Tribalistic Junkies Of Universe - Dreams
09. Jokios Kultūros - Icey Synth
10. Jokios Kultūros - Ghetto Flash
11. Auren - Exit Is The Underground
12. FAR EAST FLIGHT - REIVAZ (TRANCE CULTURE MIX)
13. Uninc & Kolomensky - Ice Train (DJ Normal 4’s Molten MixX)
14. DJ Normal 4 - Who Am I

Follow radio - @radio-vilnius
Follow artist - https://soundcloud.com/aleksandrl

Francis Harris - Thresholds

Scissor and Thread