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PRESS RELEASE
360° features tracks recorded specifically for this Foundry project by an assortment of the most intriguing and creative artists in the field. This compilation has as its center point a story fragment, a series of episodes which are illustrated with a variety of electronic music flavours, from ambient electronica to microsound and glitch. Contributors to 360° are, in order of appearance: Rhomb (releases on The Foundry and Archipelago imprint), eM (releases on The Foundry, Archipelago and Fallt), Jonathan Hughes (formerly Subspace with releases on Sunburst Fifty), High Skies (Mat Jarvis, formerly recording as Gas on Em:t), Mark Van Hoen with Seofon (Mark Van Hoen has released work as Locust and under his own name on Touch and Apollo; Seofon is a member of Ambient Temple of Imagination as well as a solo artist), Sketch (releases on Apollo and on End of Hum), Thermal (releases on his own Boxman label and Archipelago imprint), and Kim Cascone (releases on Ritornell and Digital Narcis among many others).
The album begins with Rhomb's 360° Theme, a track that displays a kind of disjointed weightlessness while conveying its auroral melodic statement. eM follows with Reflective, a passacaglia as heard through a quantum discontinuity, tones drawn out over the event horizon. Reflective segues into the first of six Interpolations, short sonic motifs which serve as bridges between tracks. Jonathan Hughes' Viscous Space emerges like some lost transmission, slowly coalescing as a downtempo groove before dissipating into the ether. Following the second bridge High Skies' Staars bubbles into life, melodic effervescence and intricate rhythm in perfect concert. Staars fades into the third Interpolation and then into Shrine, a collaboration between Mark Van Hoen and Seofon. Shrine blends intense microbeats with the vapour of worship to create a heady presence, atmospheric yet driving. Another bridge and we find ourselves amidst the compelling chaos of Zargosso. With this masterful piece Sketch attains both density and clarity, pulse and drift... contradictions that are deeply hypnotic. The penultimate Interpolation devolves into the minimal Embers. Here Thermal shows us a universe of apparent calm, events scattered over time in unusual ways, evolutions and repetitions slurring the weft of expectations. One final Interpolation and Kim Cascone's Superfield manifests a presence truly other. Focussed and jittery, Superfield resonates with untold tales, the sound of geometries intersecting, energies colliding and flowing into new moments, another chronological stream. 360° completes the circle with an echoing of Rhomb's 360° Theme, transformed here by the intervening aural sojourn into something soothing but not without lingering questions.
360° describes an arc, both in terms of a progression through musical styles and as an episodic narrative. The events of the story are mysterious, open to interpretation, but with the final track we are brought full circle, ending where we began, left with a taste of the exotic on our lips.
360° is released as part of an ongoing collaboration between The Foundry and Hypnos, co-released albums featuring ambient and experimental music. Supplemental material for 360° (including a PDF format booklet, artist biographies and reviews) is available at www.foundrysite.com/360. Orders may be placed with Hypnos, with The Foundry, or with Soleilmoon. This release will also be available from other outlets.