This one’s for the De Stijl-heads out there: Ecstatic Recordings co-founder Sam Willis (a.k.a. Primitive World) has announced a new album called White on White, inspired by the 20th century painter Marlow Moss. That’s not all: because everyone knows experimental music fans are notoriously impatient, the record is already OUT! God, I’ve missed you, art!
For those of you out of the early-20th century modernist loop, Moss (1889-1958) would best be described as “a radical, gender-bending British Jewish lesbian and innovator of non-figurative art who was a then-contemporary influence on Piet Mondrian.” (Personally, I’ve never really been fond of labels, but at least those are all pretty good ones!) For the album, Willis immersed himself in Moss’s “work, life, and theories” and crafted nine austere, inscrutable, pointed tracks with a PPG Wave synth, whose name is basically synonymous with subversive visual art as far as I’m concerned.
But who needs all those adjectives and acronyms when you can get an earful of this thing yourself?! Check out album opener “Fractions of the Absolute” down below, and go ahead and grab White on White over at Boomkat (if I were you, I’d shell out for the limited white vinyl edition with fold-out insert by curator Lucy Howarth) — and get an auditory taste (a.k.a. “a listen”) of all the tracks while you’re there. If you’d rather stare in envy at a list of numbers and words, well, I suppose you can check out the tracklisting down below, too; but it’s really your call.
White on White tracklisting:
01. Fractions of the Absolute
02. Machines for Measuring Space
03. Space Movement and Light
04. The Circumstances of Her Neglect
05. Balanced On a Slender Black Stem
06. Matrix of the Visible
07. Double Line
08. Fractions of the Absolute
09. Man Guessed At a Spiritual Meaning
More about: Primitive World
