Phos by Bloodmist

Electroacoustic improvisation trio Bloodmist is proud to present Phos, their second studio album, scheduled for release in summer of 2020. The group’s most focused offering to date, Phos showcases an expansive exploration of vivid hellscapes, encompassing elegiac clarinet melodies, feral noise textures, multi-layered electronic percussion, and wildly evocative electronic processing.

Bloodmist is Jeremiah Cymerman (clarinet, electronics), Toby Driver (electric bass), and Mario Diaz de Leon (synth and drum machine). As individual artists, Cymerman is widely known as an improviser, record producer, and experimental music evangelist through his 5049 Records Podcast, Driver is celebrated as a solo artist and as the longtime mastermind of the endlessly eclectic band Kayo Dot, while Diaz de Leon has been recognized for his bold style of electroacoustic chamber music. Since their inception in 2011, they have been steadily forging a singular and enigmatic approach to free improvisation, drawing from the realms of dark ambient, noise, and extreme metal to craft surreal explorations of otherworldly sound.

Following the release of their acclaimed debut Sheen in 2016, the group’s approach and instrumentation evolved, with Diaz de Leon abandoning the electric guitar entirely for a boutique touch-controlled synthesizer (the Tetrazzi by Ciat-Lonbarde), as well as a drum machine, providing a polyrhythmic anchor to the timbral explorations of the group. Phos was recorded during a single session in November of 2017, at NYC’s East Side Sound with engineer and longtime collaborator Marc Urselli (John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, Mike Patton). The group’s performance explored linkages between the energetic intimacy of a freely improvised trio, alongside the outer reaches of dub and the expansive saturation of dark ambient music. Cymerman edited the raw sessions into five distinctive songs, adding subtle overdubs using his own arsenal of analog synthesizers. These were then returned to Urselli for mixing, who maximized the sonic impact by revealing vivid nuances of timbre and dynamics, and enhancing low frequency weight. The resulting album evokes a sublime sense of foreground and background, evoking glacial expansiveness and saturated overload in equal measure.

The cover photography of Phos was executed by Driver, and illuminates the album’s sound through vivid evocations of otherworldly monoliths and shimmering geological forms. Individual track titles draw inspiration from the film Annihilation, in tribute to its depiction of a quarantined arboreal zone of mutating plants and animals, inhabited by an unseen alien presence.

KAYO DOT is an undefinable band led by composer Toby Driver. All the other projects and titles on this page are also the work of Toby Driver. Several additional titles are also available exclusively through our subscription service.

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