Red Lead by Chris Fratesi

"The sounds we force on the world flowing through broadcast speakers into our homes, I imagine, would create an eerie feeling, probably somewhere in our back region. The sound forcing is not in reference to the numerous ambient bits that so pleasantly mark a solo walk to public transportation or the seconds before sleep; airy exhales, bus back ups, sidewalk thwacks. These markings are not forced on the world, they are part of it a nice little reminder that things are moving as they should. The forced sounds are the odd hums off of publicly located electronics; the whirring of an overhead surveillance camera, the much too high pitched, but somehow gradually ascending tone two mobile devices may start making if they are put next to each on low battery —anomalies, things that have no reason to be producing sputtering noise, ice-y drones, or confounding rhythmic patterns. The sonic byproducts of these stupid machines is the entire make up of FRATESI’s Red Lead. No one is making the listener suffer through field recordings of a 3:00am ATM bank kiosk with doors rushing open and faint sounds of the machines spinning, rather, FRATESI produces his sounds through a myriad of ways, the methods themselves, refreshingly, are totally secondary to the end product (unlike so many people I know these days) to create this haunting and dizzying group of concise compositions. The album runs like a tour through a city struck by the famed neutron bomb, wrecking only people not property, and now the listener is neatly guided through a world where only the shittiest machines survive, producing richly complex but anxiously confusing textures that don’t exist in the pre-bomb world. There are some twists and turns on the tour, some stops in Olde-Tonality-Tone, while pleasant and calming in effect, this quick respite only serves to further unnerve because, in addition to its’ gentle chord progression, it also reminds of how alien and bizarre the whole tour has been and how the mere use of harmony, any, harmony, can evoke something so different, even if the same tools are in play. The sounds here aren’t forced on the listener, the listener is hitting play after all, but there is an invitation to imagine all the air pushed around by machines that are meant to just dispense cash or load hook-up apps onto, captured, amplified, curated and composed." - Ben Kudler

Media imprint curated by Gunther Valentine

anathema.me
SoundCloud