NeonMarshmallow

Cleared (Official Site | Immune Recordings) is the Chicago-based duo of Steven Hess & Michael Vallera. While their self-titled debut album (Immune 014, Jan 2011) found the duo exploring themes of stasis and texture, Breaking Day represents a huge development in the scope and overall style of the project. Where previous material had been slowly assembled from dozens of individual recordings and experiments, this new collection of songs was born from the raw documentation of Cleared's live performance in the studio. Elements of noise, drone, and psychedelia are filtered through a dark, unifying lens that ranges from relentless rhythmic assault to monolithic tonal sculpture. Dueling rhythms of drums and sampled percussion, walls of undulating soundscapes, and hypnotic guitar are deployed with heightened intensity and force. If Cleared's first record presented a frozen, gray-washed realm of ambient sound,Breaking Day represents its inverse: A blackened subterranean space of alien movement and activity; a premonition of an assault from the unknown.

In addition to their work with Immune, Cleared has released music on Digitalis Limited and contributed to the Antiopic compilation, Benefit for the Recovery in Japan. Their self-titled debut album found comparisons ranging from This Heat to Wolfgang Voigt and Yellow Swans. Praised byBoomkat as one of the best albums released in 2011, Cleared became a template for the project's unique combination of dissonance and fragile melodic undertones. Slowly building a reputation for an intense and immersive live show, Cleared have been privileged to share the stage with such artists as Radian, Ken Camden, Expo 70, and David Daniell. The band will embark on their first US tour in support ofBreaking Day playing shows with Mind Over Mirrors (Digitalis) and Koen Holtkamp (Thrill Jockey).

Expo 70 (Official Site | Immune Recordings) Since 2003 Justin Wright's Expo 70 project has been pushing drone and Kosmiche Musik to new realms, creating a layered world of sound that brings the listener to alien lands and foreign terrain while maintaining a dreamlike quality with shifting melodies and moods. Constant touring and a string of critically acclaimed albums released on labels such as Kill Shaman, Beta-lactam Ring, and Peasant Magik have clearly brought Expo 70's name to the forefront of modern drone and Kosmiche Musik.

Where Does Your Mind Go? is the sound of Expo 70 breaking into new terrain and is an epic statement from an artist already so highly regarded. This album is one of the most widely distributed and available of the Expo 70 catalog and is also rare in that it was recorded in a proper studio (almost all Expo 70 recordings to this point have been recorded in Wright's home studio.) The remaining songs captured during these recording sessions have been released on Immune as a companion album entitled Journey Through Astral Projection CD.

Sam Prekop (Official Site | Thrill Jockey | Acid Marshmallow Video) is known to most as the singer and songwriter of The Sea and Cake. He is a painter of some renown, a photographer and in addition he has released two solo albums of pop songs infused with his own blend of African and Brazilian guitar rhythms. Old Punch Card, his first solo effort since 2005, takes a dramatically unexpected turn away from either of these paths. Prekop described the move thus, "I'd have to say this record is pretty much unlike anything else I've done. There's some relation to music I made for my book "Photographs" but really only in instrumentation. The intro to The Sea and Cake's David Bowie cover of "Sound and Vision", on One Bedroom is an early precedent. The most significant difference, is that I've left the confines of "song" structure." The LP and CD each come in an edition of hand painted covers. "In painting the covers I found an appropriate shorthand to describing the music or re-imagining it. Start with nothing and without deduction an image appears reflecting only itself, the music arrived similarly." said Prekop.

Taking inspiration from early music concrete and electronic music, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Nuno Canavarro, Raymond Scott, David Behrman, and free improvisation, Old Punch Card is a beautifully noisy, jagged, yet stately album of synthesizer music. The ideas and implementation of Old Punch Card (the album title alluding to the electronic, faintly mechanic origins of the music) were the result of an entirely new challenge: to do something completely different from anything else he's ever created. To facilitate this end, Prekop implemented a series of strict guidelines for the recording of the album. No vocals, no guitar (though he slipped in this regard on one track), and no beats. Most of the sound material is generated by a modular synthesizer. By its very nature, it excels at some things and not at others. It's very difficult to play a conventional chord, while on the other hand, it excels at creating completely unanticipated sounds and is rather effective when it comes to "chance" composing strategies.

Each piece is in a travelogue form, all of them starting somewhere only to end somewhere else entirely. The means of transition between the elements purpose the compositions, often starting scrambled with agitation, then resting on a mechanical pattern that proves to be serenely predictable. The title track is a perfect example of this transition. "The Silhouettes" has perhaps the most tangible melodic arc to it, and the melody was guided in response to the rhythmic drone that's underlying.

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