False Aralia News

as in, a borgesian term of imprisonment in which you come to learn that stasis is an illusion. you attune and collect evidence. long shadows swing from the room’s sharpened edges, contracting and rotating with each passage of the sun, cumulatively tilting toward the next season. the cyclical heating and cooling of the concrete inscribes what you eventually recognize as an insistent rhythm onto your skin. it feels as though you’re preparing yourself to haunt the place. the first visitation comes in winter. sound bubbles from a crack in the wall, a conversation you can’t follow and hardened repeating codes that splash off the walls like rain. it had to be, and you’re looking away.

a fascination flows down the chemical gradient. songbirds take flight from a colonial square in montevideo and fall as acorns in the foothills of the sierra nevada. the moon aches, holding a teeming darkness to the edges of the clearing as we make quick work for the machines. first a pulse, then an armature is spun up around it while the whipping plasma of virtual half-thoughts cools and hardens into something more familiar. a gleaming clash of frogsong begins to reveal its cadences, unspooling into regular striations. it forms a grid in the air, the water rises to meet it, and pressed between these mirrored planes of disappearance we find our vector and glide towards the horizon.

a lacerated hunk of metal and circuitry- “Iri.gram” charred on the side- comes back round to us again, still icy from the dark reaches of its orbit as it fades across the sky like memories of a bad dream. it’s throwing signals in all directions at once, jamming any possibility of a coherent rendering and keeping its exact boundaries unknowable. electronically, it arrives as does a storm: softly, first portended by a single drop. but pick any frequency band and listen in– the cadence of the pulses as they intensify feels viscous and decidedly unmechanical. there are discernible sequences, yes, and all at 133bpm, but crouched between the frames there lurks another organizing presence that seems to grab and mutate each repetition on the way past, spewing a stream of facsimiles as it travels, seemingly in an attempt to evade both pattern recognition and any subsequent defensive reactions.

The object appears at close range, triggering neuro-pop circuits that activate deep within a network of dubwise rhythmic traces. their glow begins to pool between the gaps in the wires as we zoom, in four jumps, from a the span of a familiar room to the diameter of a paranoid microscopic twitch. Externalism all the way down. two longtime collaborators re-render: loveshadow’s anya prisk again lends her voice, wrapping a heavy halfstepping throb in her signature panorama of sheer and lace. sean conrad, west coast stargazer and steward of the inner islands label, paints wistful figures with his ewi. moving closer, the arrangements reappear as hollowed-out echoes, shedding their semantic forms as their edges leave view. closer still, the surface becomes a total matrix of vision comprised of countless flickering bits.

‘selfsame’, the second 12” on false aralia, mirrors the structure of companion release ‘zero key’ in presenting an iterative exploration of versioning itself, unspooling a line of flight through four ascending rhythmic configurations. the objects at the center remain hard to glimpse: holographic percussion, snatches of breath, contorted blue chords, and roiling subs phase in and out of perception, interlocking, dissipating and reappearing as familiar silhouettes. the slow and quick domains of rhythm superimpose and bifurcate, perpetually just out of grasp, only visible in mutual reflection. the apparent solidity of the structure dissolves into a froth of microscopic activity upon close inspection.

in the middle of it we instantiate false aralia: a series of recordings growing in all directions, cataloging the work of a group of north american collaborators centered around the studio practices of izaak schlossman (of aught, s transporter, loveshadow etc.) and facilitated by brian foote (of peak oil, kranky, etc.). with this outlet we hope to provide useful tools for dance and avenues for intentional listening.

the first release, ‘zero key’, explores valences of an idea as it slips, as would a thought or a cloud, into something else entirely across its four tracks of recursive microhouse rhythms and hallucinated dub spatializations. foregrounding its most melodic state, its most percussive, and two points between, the versions cut an indeterminate and continuous process into discrete objects that invite repurposing, layering, and other nonlinear methods of evaluation. played through, it may be interpreted as an emerging, or a coming-to-light, as a soft vocal figure develops a tougher rhythmic architecture that eventually occludes its prior form entirely. each of zero key’s facets spurs a parallel investigation into its internal logic of patterning and form.