Then: an idea is born, and travels physically from one brain into its surroundings, perhaps taking years to reach new adopters a few bird’s eye inches away on the map, evolving at the rate that mouths and hands and words can carry it.
Now: an idea is born, and instantly melts into liquid data that travels through the tubes straight into whatever brain might be waiting in the stream, spawning via mitosis the same idea ready to be hammered back onto itself and melted again.
Eric Craven’s drum performances with Hangedup as a key ensemble in the early 00s Montreal community orbiting Constellation Records enter into a teenage Jonathan Slade’s digital sphere. The band’s viola-led crescendos spark Slade into picking up the instrument himself. A decade later, Slade (Silent Land Time Machine) reaches out to Craven (Drophead) online to pass some tracks back and forth and compose as a duo. Slade’s own Holodeck Records preps the vinyl documentation of their collab, which marks the second proper outing for his SLTM (after his TMT-beloved I am no longer with myself…), and the wax debut of Craven’s Drophead project. Within a fraction of one human lifetime, the idea finds its way across the continent and back to its source.
Stream an excerpt from the duo’s monolithic two-part session From Ashes Comes the Day, premiering below, and slip into the pair’s shared dusk hallucination. Live-looped viola fragments swirl through their own afterimages into an overhead keening that covers a few acres of the stereo spread. The other available land breaks under the weight of multi-tracked guitar feeds punctuated by pickscrapes and rattling strings. Melodic phrases from both camps accumulate into a low-hanging vapor and recede as the molecules tug to separate into their most basic textural elements.
Keep your eyes on the Holodeck store for a preorder of From Ashes Comes the Day on limited edition vinyl. The duo’s suite swells through two sides to encompass a range of spectral territories best visited altogether, as far as the needle can carry on.
• Silent Land Time Machine: http://sltm.bandcamp.com
• Drophead: https://www.facebook.com/drophead514
• Holodeck Records: http://holodeckrecords.com
More about: Drophead
