If you’re living in a city, I really only see two possible avenues for music production. The first option is to create something that runs parallel to the noisy and frenetic explanation for why jackhammers and accented cursing are the sounds that backdrop both your dreams and your nightmares. The second (and absolutely final) option is to create something that foils the urban chaos by imposing an objective calm, which, point of fact, is more reminiscent of a desolate landscape than it is streets teeming with traffic and bodies and conspicuous wet spots on otherwise dry sidewalks.
The latter approach serves to relieve, ultimately; and relief was partially the goal that Jacob Long a.k.a. Earthen Sea had in mind when he was in the process of making his new album on Kranky. “In response to living in a fairly hectic city, and at a very hectic time for the world at large, creating something more drawn back and restrained felt appropriate,” he says.
Earthen Sea’s prior album An Act of Love felt pretty restrained itself, but this newest one stops short of being something to which a person could even tap their increasingly nebulous foot. You occasionally think that a track’s gonna evolve into a sub-straining display of dub techno, but instead listeners can expect to be pleasantly displaced from all manner of activity.
By way of example, check out “Existing Closer Or Deeper In Space” down below. I’ll leave it to the native New Yorkers to opine on the specific activities from which they and Long would like to be displaced.
Grass And Trees is out June 7 on Kranky, and you can pre-order it here.
Grass And Trees tracklisting:
01. Existing Closer or Deeper in Space
02. Window, Skin, and Mirror
03. Spatial Ambiguity
04. A Blank Slate
05. Living Space
06. Shallow, Shadowless
07. Less and Less
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