seht - HRRY
Digitalis LP (+ 3'' CD-r), 2009
"Since Digitalis first planted its roots over six years ago, few artists have been as integral to and representative of the label as New Zealand's drone king, seht. We've released three of his albums and he's appeared on multiple compilations and collaborations. seht has always been the work of one Stephen Clover. He comes from a long line of great Kiwis like The Dead C and Birchville Cat Motel, but has always blazed along similar trails as giants such as Tony Conrad, Eno, and Olivier Messiaen. That being said, none of it prepared us for the leap forward he took on his first ever vinyl release, HRRY.
While some artists struggle to make music that is wholly avante-garde and still approachable and listenable, Clover avoids those pitfulls masterfully. HRRY is in exercise in the use of crackling electronics, minimal beats, computer manipulation and solid-state drones. Each track slowly progresses as they build off each other and form a sprawling conglomeration of tones. It's as if you're stuck in a post-apocalyptic dreamworld where industrial giants are fighting back against the warm, relentless elegance of nature. Even though the arsenal Clover is using is as unnatural as it gets, the music on HRRY displays such an innate organicness that it's almost confusing. From the computerized voice of "ERKK" to the throbbing beat of "SPFT," it's as though he's gone so far into the mechanical, man-made world that he's come all the way to the other side.
HRRY is a dark album that is glazed with a sense of hope. Echoes of the ghosts of Basinski ride through these ambient rivers, trying to find new forms of electronic music. It's music for the second coming... of what? An era where all the rotting buildings and shades of grey breathe new life into the elemental ashes of fallen empires."
- Digitalis website
LP comes in silver & black fold-out poster sleeve, includes a special 3" CD-r and is strictly limited to 150 copies.
What they said...
"... neat collection of lo-fi drone/thump from stephen clover, taking in influences from seefeel, req, and the whole “heroin house” brigade ..."
- Mimaroglu Music Sales website
"..an ambient drone style of lucious soundscapes and mellow electronics."
"Unbelievably affecting midnight drones and death ambient.
New Zealander Stephen Clover's seht project returns to the Digitalis imprint for his followup to 2006's The Green Morning. For HRRY seht crafts ultra subtle drone atmospheres and spectral ambient scapes, at times coming across like a mumbled Messiaen, a darker cousin to Eno or the perfect bedfellow for the recent Leyland Kirby series. Spooked drum machines underpin much of the A-side, slowing the rhythms until they sound like approaching footsteps or a full sunken and quasi-speed version of industrial techno like Zhark's Kareem reworked by Oren Ambarchi. Here, organ notes are held with the meditative quality of someone who can slow their pulse to the bare minimum, until they're stretched so far a guttural subbass underbelly is required to fill the vacuum of grey space. The B-side largely abandons the rhythmic framework for five much shorter yet expansive compositions, craftily mixing alien sounds across the audio field while moving to different scenes of cinematic narrative, from archaic silent movie drama to dystopian sci-fi abstraction, recalling the paranoid feel of Philip K. Dick, or maybe imagining Darren Aronofsky working with Stars Of The Lid instead of The Kronos Quartet. This is music built with a rarified, unsettling and subtly spectral quality in mind that late night listeners will find hard to separate from the ambient drones of fridges, traffic and computers, blurring the distinctions between his reality and yours. Incredible music, limited copies."
"Another fine installment of laptop-generated drone from Stephen Clover. The tracks on the vinyl are shorter than his usual slowly creeping epics but the subtly shifting repetition, dub overtones, distant foghorn drones and disjointed computerized voice build into an ominous presence of slowly asphyxiating unease that lingers long after the disc has finished."
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