Written, recorded and mixed by Matt Evans while in residence at Pioneer Works, December 2018
Artwork “Fluorescent Anomaly” (2014) by Devra Freelander
Additional Synths on “Jaich Maa” recorded by Elori Kramer
Mastered by Heba Kadry
Layout and Design by Benedict Kupstas
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Evans has played with underground rock bands such as Tigue, Bearthoven, and Rokenri (as well as Kid Millions’s Man Forever) but New Topographics is his first solo album. It’s an idiosyncratic exploration of percussive timbres, unusual drones and intricate rhythms, often sounding like a logical progression from the Japanese environmental music collected on Light in The Attic’s Kankyō Ongaku compilation. The album stems from Evans’s interest in hyper objects, which philosopher Timothy Morton defines as “objects that are so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity”.
Opener “Full Squid” establishes the vibe with a hurly-burly yet introspective scenario. Evans lays down and understands drone over which polyrhythms tinkle and blorp with Rube Goldberg illogic. It’s a kinetic and microbial wonder. The title “An Infinite Cybernetic Meadow” recalls Richard Brautigan’s poem All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace (whose ironic utopianism Evans cites as influence) with its fusion of synthetic and organic elements. Insectoid blurts fidget amid a subtropical sound field in which ominous conga hits and torpid bass spar with well-timed triangle taps. A profusion of sonic otherness prevails, proving Evans to be one of the most inventive of Jon Hassell’s growing legion of adherents. “Cold Moon” and its companion piece “New Moon” generate unsettling factory floor drones similar to This Heat’s “24 Track Loop” while overlaying it with what sounds like amplified water droplets on tupperware and other unconventional effects.
Suffused with bizarrely tuned percussion and synths, Evans’s uniquely strange and beautiful tracks thus the listener into hyperreal yet phantasmal realms.
