Forking Path Navigator

Label: Oblast

Catalog#: OBL-002

Format: CDr

Country: U.S.A.

Released: Oct. 2005

Limited Edition 150 Copies

Tracklisting:

1. Forking Path Navigator (39:09)

Press:

Matt Shoemaker - Forking Path Navigator

It has been almost four years since Seattle's Matt Shoemaker released Warung Elusion for Trente Oiseaux, and during the intervening years, he has honed his already impressive electroacoustic compositional skills. Forking Path Navigator is structured around a swarming mass of sound that slowly builds out of a whisper and snaps abruptly at it's 40 minute conclusion. From afar, the album appears as a monochromatic avalanche; but on closer inspection, Shoemaker produces a dynamic Kaleidoscope within these tumbling snowdrifts of gray tonalities. He mingles the heavy filtered field recordings and glassine feedback systems, steadily moving from a vertiginous weightlessness to a boiling crucible of seething hiss. Throughout the album, he introduces a subtle rhythmic plod, which he disguises in various forms of a metallic klang, a bowed piece of metal, the crash of surf, and a distant promethean thud. Thanks to these variable structures and to his attention to detail to detail, Shoemaker has crafted a spectral album of bewildering psychogeography.

Jim Haynes - Wire magazine

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