Label Description: Feral Grace was written around old childhood places reclaimed by nature, or replaced by new housing estates. Places long forgotten, their purpose discarded as the world moved on. Yet the memories stay there, caught in the undergrowth, thought of once in a while.
We remember gathering leaf moss from the woods for our tomato plants. Building dams in shallow streams. Filling our wellies with frog spawn and carrying it home like treasure. Small acts that felt large at the time.
Fishing banks where we spent hours. Not talking, just sharing food. Two cans of shandy bass and egg sandwiches. The water long drained and the people gone, but if you look hard enough you can still see the faint outline of where it once was.
Some places still hold the paths where people once walked to work. The tracks remain cut into the land, but the work itself has gone. Trades smashed during the years of Thatcher, ripping communities apart. That memory still lives on. You see it when a scab walks into the pub. Some things are never forgotten.
The music on Feral Grace sits between then and now. A bridge between memory and the present day. A last spell cast before those memories fade and the fingerprints disappear.
Who will know we were here at all?
Perhaps only a distant echo left behind in our Feral Grace.
Written, Mixed, Produced and Mastered By The Black Dog – 353
From Stephen: written and produced by variant in ann arbor, mi. [2020-2025] additional modular synthesis provided by antiquemodulations, detroit, mi. usa. mixdown and premastering by alex gold. mastered by stephen hitchell in echospace. thanks to: alex gold, chris federsen, gerard hanson, martin, richard, jimmy, kevin martin, rod modell, sam valenti, steve barker, tomoko and family at disk union and everyone around the world supporting this sonic art.
For the fiftieth release in the series, I’m thrilled to share an extended-length interpretation from a foundational figure in the electronic music world, the Detroit-based Stephen Hitchell, here as variant.
Describing the importance of Stephen’s contribution to electronic music is a huge task – born out of the visionary axis between Detroit, Chicago and Berlin, he built on structures laid by those before him to create a universe of vast depth and sonic beauty. Along with many collaborators, his label echospace [detroit] became a home for forward-thinking dub-spirited music.
This, and numerous releases on other labels, including the seminal The Coldest Season on Modern Love with regular partner Rod Modell, and ground-breaking live performances everywhere from Berghain to Movement, made Stephen indivisible from any conversation of the most important artists of our time.
Under the guise of variant, we might find Stephen at his deepest, as he puts it: “to score the constellation of mystical events occurring in the depths of space”
With while the universe sleeps, he has achieved something remarkable. As with all the variant music, Stephen takes influence from the vast recesses of the cosmos, both imaginatively and sonically.
Drawing on NASA’s sound archive, “the vast echoes of space have been manipulated and resynthesized throughout the duration of this sonic experience.”
Through decades of dedication to his craft, Stephen has become a producer of almost unparalleled skill – all seen through the lens of formative years immersed in the inception and evolution of techno, house, ambient and countless detours. All this is brought to bear on while the universe sleeps – a truly masterful deep-space voyage, eighty minutes submerged in cathartic waves of interstellar bliss.
Infinitely spacious – echoing chords and endlessly sustaining pads establish an emotional core, surrounded by highly-processed astral transmissions and organic analogue noise. Always underpinned by sub-bass reminiscent of the lowest frequencies emanating from the studios of Jamiaca, that are also of massive significance to Stephen’s work.
Huge thanks to Stephen, an incredible addition to the series.
The artwork was made as always influenced by the music and idea behind the album – originating from a photo from Stephen which was then captured with analogue photography and processed here at quiet details studios.
As usual, the album is presented on the physical edition, a custom six-panel digipack with a separate fine art print too.
The CD also has a special long-form continuous mix of the album, representing the music in its purest form.
From Stephen:
written and produced by variant in ann arbor, mi. [2020-2025] additional modular synthesis provided by antiquemodulations, detroit, mi. usa. mixdown and premastering by alex gold. mastered by stephen hitchell in echospace. thanks to: alex gold, chris federsen, gerard hanson, martin, richard, jimmy, kevin martin, rod modell, sam valenti, steve barker, tomoko and family at disk union and everyone around the world supporting this sonic art.
Aspetuck has been steadily carving out a name for himself through releases on Never Late and Oslated, garnering a respected following for his DJ mixes and festival performances. Aspetuck’s latest record, Immersion, was sequenced and curated from dozens of ideas spanning a transformative few years in Griff’s life. The album is less a snapshot in time and more of a memory bank – flashes of fatherhood, loss, modular rabbit holes, late-night studio sessions, and long walks by the Hudson River with his daughter.
The emotional undertow of the album is immediate. Opener, Hit Me With Your Pet Shark, is one of the earliest compositions in the collection, created just months after the loss of Griff’s brother and during the sleepless swirl of new parenthood. Built around a single sound from Spectrasonics Omnisphere, found while rediscovering his brother’s studio gear, the track sets the tone: restrained yet searching, personal without becoming precious.
From there, The Printing Press captures the raw energy of a live jam in Griff’s upstate New York basement, running through a 1980s Tascam mixer like a lo-fi assembly line of synths, pads, and drum machines. REI, named after a spontaneous family mission to find a pink water bottle, encapsulates his knack for imprinting daily minutiae into sound. And title track Immersion- once known simply as “Tuesday 303 Jam”- emerges from a dinner break and a blender, distilling modular sketches and distorted drums into a powerful, slow-motion march.
Under, Under The Tree hits hardest. Built around a grainy iPhone voice memo of Griff’s daughter singing by the Hudson. And closing the album is Bobik, a collaborative studio session with Moon Patrol channeling the playful chaos of a close friendship and modular exploration. Named after a joke about their golden retriever and filled with alien textures from Griff’s beloved EMU XL7 gifted years ago by his late brother, it’s a fitting send-off to an album that straddles celebration and mourning with grace.
The artwork comes courtesy of Peter Skwiot Smith, whose textured analog/digital aesthetic resonated immediately with Griff’s original vision. Peter’s treatment draws on Griff’s personal photography and leans into motion, blur, and the layered nature of memory, echoing the album’s sonic tone without overexplaining it.
Mastered by Sven Weisemann, Immersion is available on blue smoke colored 12” and digital
Written and produced by Griff Fulton Mastered by Sven Weisemann Artwork by Peter Skwiot Smith Cat: ASIPV055
Hverheij returns with his third Triplicate LP, serving up a mature and moody collection of dark symphonies that sound plucked directly from some award winning Scandinavian drama. 11 tightly constructed and neatly sequenced excursions to the other side await you. Dig in.
**************** INTERVIEW **************** George Ernst AKA Suncastle: This album kinda spooked me. Did you go into this intending to make such a foreboding piece of music?
Harry Verheijen AKA Hverheij: My idea when working on this album was focused on the concept of how creation evolved from void at the dawning of the world. From nothing comes something. How to take the abstract of that and give it some substance through my Push 2 offered me a way of producing sound further removed from other recent projects. I hadn’t really thought about doing anything deliberately foreboding as such, but I found immediate direction with ambient-based sounds in capturing nuances of the void. The first track I worked on was “In The Rising”, which portrays a quiet kind of disturbance and a type of uneasy anticipation, but nothing particularly foretelling of what would come later when doing other tracks. Once I started working on the Outreach pieces in particular, though, some of the music took on darker elements very naturally. How those foreboding elements interplay with the concept of creation as it evolves by the album’s conclusion is open to interpretation, of course.
GE: Are moodier pieces as fun to work on as joyous ones? I enjoy listening to both in more or less equal measure.
HV: Moody pieces are great fun! In the last 6 months I’ve had the pleasure of working in a unique collaborative venture online, where artists contribute without knowing in advance exactly what anyone else will be contributing. It has been a rare improvisation of eclectic sound, dark intonations, progressive directions and bright energy all rolled into one. It’s exciting to work on music against typecast of any kind because it stretches the imagination to produce by design something in that context.Maybe the horrendous weather we were having out here on the wet coast during the time I was working on Afterlight helped the imaging for some of the moodier tracks included in the final selection. Dark, gloomy days certainly acted as a catharsis. What I liked about working on those tracks was that I could use synth sounds not usually experimented with and that’s a fun thing to do at any time. And when the music heads off into the beyond, that’s satisfying. The last thing I want to do is repeat same old, same old. To quote Buzz Lighyear, “To infinity and beyond!” Of course, sometimes that takes it outward to show the dark side. And may the force be with you! Similarly, I get excited when I hear music produced by anyone where the sound is inventive and pushes into new boundaries. That just opens up the world and inspires! Like you, George, I enjoy the music in equal measure, whether its darker in mood or brighter in spirit. My choice of listening preference on a given day is occasionally filtered by the mood I may already be in, but my appreciation of what I hear isn’t limited that way. I let the artist take me on the road less travelled as the music plays when I listen. So I feel enriched – my personal music collection has a broad range.
GE: Played any good video games lately?
HV:Out of the swings of Assassin’s Creed II, it was easy to see the appeal of Fortnight some years back. Then Riot Games brought out Legends of Runeterra, which is based on a “free” mobile platform of collecting cards for power competing against multi-players. I like that it also has a single player mode. But, like a number of these types of games, there’s a certain investment needed to progress, too. As a strategy game with action, it’s been fun and very addictive once I got started. Easy to get lost in the imaginary world of it. But the complexity of keeping character cards clearly identified in my head with their rankings of spells, powers, and abilities is surreal. Just not enough hours to dedicate to keeping that game going consistently, which is the whole idea if you want to be really good with it. Go, Ezreal! Under their smaller sister company, Riot Games will be putting out a single player game for PC or console called Convergence that looks intriguing and is probably more in line with my particular time investment constraints. As a spin-off to the League of Legends universe, Convergence aims to follow the story of Ekko in the city of Zaun. In the outline, Ekko is a young inventor who creates a device that can manipulate time but encounters serious consequences to doing so. Preliminary action sequences look really cool! I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with it at the final release coming out later this year. And since I’m probably better shooting from the hip than casting cards, this might be a new fun diversion between music projects and other goings on.
GE: The structure and sequencing here are excellent. I love how you play with the listener’s mood, for instance, placing the bright and hopeful ‘Beyond Cubism’ after one of the darkest tunes on the record. Was this a challenge to get right?
HV: Yes, there were a few challenges. The order of the tracks on the album were not the order in which I actually worked on them, so I was progressing from a very abstract album concept at the outset and wasn’t sure how it would literally play out. Only when most of them were completed did I have a better idea of how the tracks might fit together. To give a clue to this, my original idea was that I would have started the album with “Outreach 1” and then followed with tracks in a different order from what you see in the final version. I changed the opening track choice because I felt that such a stark initiation to the album would have misrepresented what I later conceptualized as a better lead-in. There were also a couple of tracks that were dropped in the making, so there was a bit of private push and pull to album content before I sent in the demo. Not the first time for that, likely not the last time that happens, either. Anyway, in the end I decided the order of the tracks for Afterlight as you now see it presented. But it took a few shuffles to get it there. Your kind words give me confidence that maybe I got it right. So thanks for that!
GE: Would you rather the floor was lava (and your furniture was miraculously resistant to it) or wherever room you’re in, you’re constantly sharing it with no less than five wasps?
HV: These most dire members of the order of Entomons hold little appeal to the tranquility of my Zen. No less than five, you posit? But more you might deposit? I’ll take my vorpal sword in hand; so long time these manxome foes I sought— and rest me by the Tumtum tree, to stand awhile in thought……nay, they cannot stay. Sword of action would prove pure, the Raid more sure. I’ll use the spray! So raised against the buzz I made attack, my vorpal blade went snicker-snack with earnest wack; and released deep vapours hung with flack – followed that with wheezing hack. By one’s, and two’s, then three’s they fell – these wasps alighted as from hell. I left them dead, and with their manxome heads went galumphing back. “And hast thou slain the Entomon? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” Judge Poon loud chortled in his joy. Justified under retreating insecticidal glower, I pleaded to the hour of this power. Therewith a vincebus eruptum to newfound incorruptum – I took contemplation of lava over a sweet cup of java. Now, as in uffish thought I stand on lava floor, tongues of flame come whiffling through the tulgey wood and burbles my furniture as it comes! In char, like tar, it splinters that apart. How must I make a start? ‘Twas scrillig, and the plithy toves did myre and kimble in the glabe; All flimsy were the horogoves, and the tome paths outstrabe. (LC…/hv)
GE: What does the concept of Afterlight signify on this album?
HV: Afterlight is meant to signify a conscious response to the creative force – both the metaphysical and the internal. Recognition is fluid and often illuminated through universal expressions: ars est celare artem. The music of this album is a reflection of these broad strokes and conveyed emotionally. The main unifying elements of the album shift through aspects of half-light – or the interplay between light that filters through darkness. As life emanates from light, spirit rises out of void. These elements are inseparable as creation reaches outward. Let there be growth!
**************** REVIEW **************** No two Hverheij records sound alike. The only consistent theme is quality. Afterlight is his third release on Triplicate Records, following last Halloween’s Fringe Telemetry LP, and his wonderful label debut ‘If not Now’ from Xmas 2020.Sufficed to say like any of our quality artists, he lives and breathes this stuff. Indeed, it feels as though he’s breathing life into music itself on the organic and airy opening tracks ‘Nothing but the Pest u Lent’ and ‘In the Rising’. The former subtly tells us this record is going to be filled to the brim with menace. Colder themes are to be explored. The latter supplemented by a gorgeous yet foreboding voice, sung over cold knifepoint synthesizers. It’s all quite haunting and alarming, but it’s all just so beautifully arranged that you’ll find yourself quite contented to ride Hverheij’s ghost train to the next uneasy stop.First of a trilogy, ‘Outreach 1’ sounds like just that. A long forgotten destination on a ghostly line long since decommissioned, and in the same way that such real life locations can be thrilling to visit, the third track on the record has an undeniable magnetism to its murk. Elsewhere, ‘Biomorphology’, at nine and a half minutes into the album is the first glimmer of hope. The cold and desolation have been enjoyable to bask in, yet there’s no escaping the dopamine those pretty pipes releases. Soon accompanied by a smartly programmed arpeggio and string section, this extremely sonically varied tune is a pure delight to imbibe from start to finish.The slick arp-work continues on ‘Becoming’, their immediate revival announced by a warped and otherworldly horn arrangement. It feels as though the preceding themes are being married here. There’s bright notes of hope in the aforementioned arps playfulness, but the heaviness of the overall mood, and the cynical melodies threaten to swallow it.Appropriately titled, ‘Big Sky Dreaming’ has the most bombastic sound on the album. Punchy drums, soaring pads and a thumping, bubbling bass bound joyously into the moodier ‘Outreach 2′, a desolate frightening piece of music that conjures half remembered nightmares of running in place from the unidentifiable threat, represented here by the ominous pounding of drums.’Beyond Cubism’ feels like a beacon of hope, a decisive answer from the future to the pain-soaked question posed by its predecessor, though it’s not without edge. The erratic synth work gels dreamily with the returning vocals, and by the end, you’re not so sure whether you’ve been handed a life raft or an anchor. The sound of pulsing, sharp electricity becomes a recurring theme towards the end of the album, and is well represented on the following ‘All Reason Fled’. With a title like that, there’s not a lot of room for goofing around. Sure enough, it’s an intricately composed, mature piece of electronica that might feel therapeutic under the right listening conditions. Packed with delightful textures, funky organ stabs and warping effects, it’s an undeniably fun listen, and a definite highlight.Penultimately we arrive at the final instalment of the Outreach trilogy. Grandiose in its darkness and decidedly conclusive in sound. Tentative half-human sounding vocal flourishes, interspersed with Harsh blasts of noise and reverb-laden loose drum swings coalesce to create a cavernous and chaotic gem, which crumbles peacefully into our (sort of) title track, ‘A is for Afterlight’. Pretty keys that sound like the aural equivalent of bioluminescence are scattered across this simple, yet effective closer. The choice of simplicity here feels deliberate. In equal parts a sweet pudding after a rich and characterful main course of an album, and a palette cleanser for the next slice of genius Hverheij is sure to serve up. Dig in.
George Ernst Triplicate Records
Written & Produced by Harry Verheijen Mastered by Michael Southard Artwork by Bryan Kraft
Severed+Said sounds like music made in a dark room with one flickering candle and a head full of unsent letters.
It lives in that shadowy realm between darkwave and post-industrial. The beats aren’t there to make you dance so much as take you inward, inspiring a reflective trance. Mechanical pulses tick like anxious thoughts. Synths stretch and moan, often detuned, uneasy, like they don’t trust themselves. Melody shows up, but it’s wounded, scarred, and limping. Beautiful because it’s alive, existing in the nether zone.
The latest offering, ‘SEER’, takes the ethos to unseen heights. Soaring in a murky, watercolor world. Somewhere between the dark of night and the soft glow of dawn. The kind of record that sits with you in your own uncertainty, pulling you closer, seeing you as you are. – HPT
Written and recorded by John Touchton Mixed and mastered by Jeremiah Ezekiel Johnson Art and design by Jason Gvvl Cassette Design by Justin Myers
Music For The Rest Of Us 