[A slow, awkward introduction]
There is a special place in hell for those people who introduce themselves by saying “I’m not going to remember your name.”
By which I mean to say: “Hello Shamos”.
You do a great show on NTS radio, extending the casual precision that bubbles through your ‘productions’ to a curatorial role, entangling your own songs amongst friends like Steven Julien / Funkineven, Low Income Squad and Huerco S.
I say ‘productions’ because your music is refreshingly free of hubris and protracted novelty, of overbearing authorship. It feels more like a conversation with the machines and musics from which it emerges, and happy to sit in a particular context, rather than grapple to be seen to be transcending it.
At times through your new cassette album, I Can Think Of Nothing Else But This Machine, we can almost hear the playful contortions of glitch and IDM, but arrived to through hardware experimentation and humour, rather any deliberate courting of genre.
Drum machines and synths are given it space to hiccup, collapse, and gather together – an improvisational quality that is convivial rather than showy.
In “The Dream You Had” you encapsulate this messy beauty with a set of drones, squelches, meandering keyboards and robotic breaths that is at once mournful and elated, silly and contemplative.
Like previous experiments with Apron Records (and beyond) in blissed-out techno, disorientated acid, and dubby new wave, the song doesn’t feel compelled to present a mapped out chronology.
It is the quiet friend playing the forgotten casio keyboard at 4am, batteries waning, eyes down and lost for a moment, while the small crowd hushes and someone says:
“Dude that actually sounds kind of amazing”
[Thanks for re-introducing me]
More about: Shamos
