Audible: Dan Hayhurst
Visible: Reuben Sutherland
Mastering: Andreas Lubich [LUPO]

Psyché Tropes / LTR Records 2024

Sculpture’s new album Max Ax is the product of constant recombination of wildcard sonic and visual elements into new forms in performance. Catching a live AV set by the duo is to enter a maximal portal into their visionary aesthetic, as Sutherland's kaleidoscopic visual turntablism and Hayhurst's analogue/digital hybrid of electronic pop and experimental splatter combine in free associations and unstable reactions.

Max Ax is the capture of one possible frame in this ongoing sequence, but it is also Sculpture’s most direct and focused transmission yet.

Sculpture’s music may be compulsively metamorphic but a consistent intent and stylistic confidence connects these eleven compositions. Hayhurst’s signature junk pop gnarl is present, a chewed tape melodic sensibility holding the assembly together while surfing chaos. Tape loop psychedelia, overdriven techno, cassette deck melancholia and disintegrating chamber pop combine with a moire of varispeed electronics and percussion.

The resulting first thought best thought dynamism is sometimes ferocious, sometimes joyous, trashy ecstatic or strange, but always singular.

Sutherland's artwork playfully references recurrent motifs in the duo's work. The opaque corporate/ scientific department with its maze of abandoned zones visualises environment as pattern, threatening containment while inviting exploration. The visual language of product design and commercial exploitation is subverted in absurdist combinations of the organic and synthetic, banal and fantastic, geometric and cartoonish. Cryptic devices for calculation, summoning or nonsense are simultaneously futuristic and medieval. The facility has been compromised in some unknown event and strange code has broken through.

Max Ax marks a first collaboration between LTR Records and Psyché Tropes. Available on deluxe double gatefold 10” zoetrope disc and download. The album is available direct from LTR Records and Psyché Tropes, as well as from select record stores, online and via all streaming services.

Double 10" Zoetrope

Max Ax

Musician etc. Noisy half of audiovisual duo Sculpture

Audiovisual duo Sculpture mix animation, video art and unstable sonics to uniquely synaesthetic effect.

Max Ax

SCULPTURE