Automaton

Description

CD Packaging is a Jewel Case.

LP Packaging comes w/ a Digital Download Card.

Art by Dr. Woo.

Gossamer is Evan Reinerthe producer, guitarist, synthesizer scientist and urban-spelunking field recorder whose full-length debut Automaton dissolves the genre-breaking electronica of Autechre and Boards of Canada into a bottomless sea of found sound and ambient atmosphere. Its less an album than an environment all its own, or a journey into the unexplored. And whether its inspiring a trip deep into the discography of Steve Reich or into Californias beautifully desolate Ansel Adams Wilderness, its that fearless spirit of exploration that brought Automaton to life.

Reiner grew up in the L.A. neighborhood of Eagle Rock with a father telling war stories about seeing Black Flag and the Germs play and with a set of cousins whod get him started listening to hip-hop. (Especially instrumentals by iconoclastic producers like Premier, RZA and New Yorks crushing DITC crew, Reiner remembers.) As he turned 16, he was playing guitar religiously, he says, as well as listening intently to Slayer and Cannibal Corpse on the way to ferocious hardcore shows on the fringes of Los Angeles.

By the time he graduated high school, he was a hardcore kid with a heavy grounding in hip-hop whod developed so tremendously as a guitarist that he was practicing notoriously formidable Django Reinhardt songs for fun. The connection might not seem obvious, but it was there nonethelessthese were three distinct musical forms equally dedicated to passion, individual technique and total commitment to expression.

He won admission to the prestigious Berklee School of Music in Boston, where his first semesters in the fall of 2009 were everything hed hoped. But the more he studied, the clearer it became that hed need to strike out on his own: So many professors would tell their students what the right thing to do was in a creative setting, he says now. There is no right way.

Hed once used his computer just to help with his composition homework, but now he was restless. So he began to focus on the potential of electronic music: I realized it was like having every component of a band at your fingertips, he says. It felt free and genuine with no distractions. Hed begun to make his own field recordings, too, capturing the sounds of Boston at sunrise and stirring them into his beat experiments. Intense study of movie sound and foley artistry, like pouring sand across drum cymbals or using spent shells from a gun range for percussion, gave him a whole new vocabulary, and he found further inspiration in artists from Ai Weiwei to Maya Duren to Stanley Kubrick to Delia Derbyshirepeople who blew open the boundaries of their own disciplines.

Then in July 2013, he began to make what would become his first full-length album as Gossamer. Hed rent an armful of microphones and hike to the tunnels under Pasadenas eerie Devils Gate Dam, site of suicides and barely-thwarted summonings in the tradition of Aleister Crowley. (The echo is crazy, he says.) During a month in Japan, he recorded terrifying trains and cicadas and the squeals of a rusting bicycle. Hed record himself smashing trash under a bridge in downtown L.A., or knocking rebar against rotting wood 8,000 feet above sea level in Californias Ansel Adams Wilderness Area. Then hed come homewhether home at that particular moment was his own studio, a capsule hotel in Japan, a friends place in Boston or a temporary space in New Yorkand make accidents happen, he says, with recorders and samplers and guitar and (this time) a stable of analog synthesizers.

The result was Gossamers Automaton, a precise and gentle dreamscape of experimental electronica, where the ambient atmosphere of Gas drifts across the fractured beats of Autechre or Boards of Canada. It starts with its own sunrise on Thoughtform, where birdsong melts into ghostly vocals and waves of synthesizer, and then shifts into the haunting Print, which transplants the sci-fi sensibilities of Vangelis to some desolate and wild new world. His Okuma is like a Tortoise song that never touches solid ground, while tracks like [3] and [5] recall the Brian Eno of Fourth World, somehow ancient and futuristic at once. When the crickets start chirping on closer -;- , its a signal that the dayand the journeyare both coming to an end. Its might be his first album, but its also a first step towards something new.

Automaton is me, Reiner explains. It’s my process. Its a symbol of having accepted that there is a difference between being alone and being lonely. Its a coping mechanism for the struggle to realize and balance what I am and am not in control of in my life. It reminds me of playing Bioshock and watching Blade Runner at the same time while naked in the jungle on another planet. It makes me think of watching an old home video of myself and seeing Neptune right outside my window. The list goes on and onI could go forever.