Ink by Alpine Decline

FINALLY HERE! VERY LIMITED RUN!

Did Alpine Decline’s latest album, INK, emerge from the pollution clouds of Beijing where they’ve made their home, or from the bottom of a murky sea? The opening track, “The Cuttlefish and Its Ink,” suggests the latter, imploring you with a simple descending theme that is positively swallowed by a warm black blast of synthesizers fed through a chain of tape echoes.

On this, their 6th album, Alpine Decline have ditched the drums and guitars and brought forward dense layers of wheezing oscillators, decaying tapes wowwing and fluttering, and filtered washes of white noise — sounds that on previous records served as a landscape around a ripping rock band now stretching out and rattling the windows with wider frequencies.

Conceived and recorded live in the band’s home in Tongzhou on the eastern outskirts of the PRC capital metropolis, INK is like looking (or rather, listening) to Alpine Decline through a prism that has split their elements apart. In places we are lost in the toxic fog, and suddenly the band’s deep songwriting emerges in an listing melody and a precise lyric — no more so than on the album’s centerpiece “Keep Saying It’s OK” — a ten minute skip along an irregular heartbeat with JZ’s imploring vocals sweeping down from above.

This seven track vinyl-only release stands apart from Alpine Decline’s previous albums in its tone and character (not to mention its instrumentation), but present still is the sense that you are not listening to a band but entering a different world — or at the very least leaving this one.

alpine decline is jz / pz
all songs written by alpine decline except:
No Sadness, No Joy written by alpine decline + yang haisong
produced by yang haisong
all music recorded live to tape at B604 beijing
vocals recorded at psychic kong beijing
master by garrett haines (treelady)
"ink" logo by liu lu
artwork by pascaline warsky
P & C Laitdbac Records/
North American Mountain and Wilderness Society A.S.C.A.P.
winter 2015

Tracklist

1.	The Cuttlefish and its Ink	5:26

2.	Keep Saying It's OK	9:38

3.	A Sun is Born	5:10

4.	Behind the Door, B604	5:44

5.	No Sadness, No Joy	4:10

6.	Ripen on the Vine	5:56

7.	Finally the Star Collapses	6:21

Credits

released April 22, 2016

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