Album · Daniel Crompton · 2018
With production spanning a period of over 13 years and mastering for digital release by Noel Summerville (Flying Lotus, Plaid & Gonjasufi), Inscendence applies digital manipulation to found sounds, ambient field recordings and traditional instruments to construct sonic events through a process of moderated improvisation, fusing the organic with the technical.
The method
I started making music electronically around twenty-five years ago and got hooked fast, first on Cool Edit, then following it through its life as Adobe Audition, building melodies and beats in Audacity alongside it. It was slow, but it put me right inside the detail of what I was making.
The method was almost always the same. I explore my environment with a field recorder, sampling the sounds of my kitchen, instruments, or the nearby wood and lakes. Once home, I would isolate a single sound gathered, then try effect after effect on it until something worked, and either fold that into the session or drop it into a multitrack and play it like an instrument, building melodies, harmonies and percussion out of the sounds of my world.
Destructive, slow and delicate. Almost everything on the album starts life as a field recording.
Sounds are stretched and distorted beyond recognition, then layered to produce grinding, guttaral sounds offset against distant, haunting ambient atmospheres, which shift seamlessly into melodic, glitched passages.
Press
“a rare lighthouse”
Simon Tucker · Louder Than War ↗
Reviewing Inscendence for Louder Than War, Simon Tucker described a record that moves like a sleep cycle, shifting from glitchy electronica into gothic chamber ambience without ever jarring, at once serene and macabre, with the faintest echo of where each piece began left playing underneath. Mastered for release by Noel Summerville, whose credits include Flying Lotus and Gonjasufi.