Willow, the whispers are calling me, and they sound so sweet, like may rain

I went to the fog of lost souls and everybody knew you

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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

Every Degree Of Distance

Francis Harris - Every Degree Of Distance

Cut Up

Francis Harris - Cut Up

Speculative Nature Of Purposive Form

Francis Harris - Speculative Nature Of Purposive Form

I Can Still See Us

Francis Harris - I Can Still See Us

Francis Harris - Thresholds

Time Machine is a radio program hosted by @adytoledano and myself. Every month, we laser in on a specific year, and read factoids off of Wikipedia while listening to music from that year. In a nod to classic FM radio, we also have a trivia component where people can call in to win a prize. For our first show, we went back to 1979 and our prize was a Pine Knob Summer of '79 festival tee. 

We will be returning to the Refuge Worldwide airwaves on March 18, when our time machine will be taking us back to 1981.

Time Machine - 1979 (w/ Ady Toledano)

RADIO.D59B / COSMIC CAROUSEL #21 w/ Nevena Stankovic

An avid Italo Disco enthusiast, Aficionado devotes this episode of Francachela to the genre. The result: a mélange of tacky and life-affirming cheesy energy that we all need in our lives from time to time. Enjoy!

REFUGE WORLDWIDE
www.refugeworldwide.com/artists/dj-aficionado
www.instagram.com/refugeworldwide/?hl=de

Refuge Worldwide - Francachela - Oct 25 2022

Out there...in the perimeter with GK Machine [30.01.2023]

✝️▫️Slowed Version by 420daysfreetrial▫️✝️

Loneliness (Slowed)

Luminous

HOLD ONTO ME

Music From The Penguin Cafe

Zopf: Pigtail (2008 Digital Remaster)

A Fossil Begins To Bray

Elephant

Scissor & Thread is cut from a different cloth than your average dance imprint.

Francis Harris - Thresholds

Scissor and Thread

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