Holotype by Orrest

Hot on the heels of a bruising third release – Brothomstates’ archival timebomb, Untitled, sent from the past to destroy the present and very nearly succeeding – we have a somewhat smoother although no less singular dish to serve up.

Orrest is a multimedia artist from Manchester, whose name derives from a patch of Cumbria dear to him and central to this, his debut, project. A bitesize LP and series of associated objects, plucked from said Cumbrian landscape and arranged for home consumption, Holotype is as much a staunch (but sensitive) distillation of urban sonics – techy mid-90s IDM, contemporary UK bass music, Autonomic pop – as it is a psychogeographic sketch of the rural space it serenades.

Moreover, in an age of ‘studio muscle’, ‘sound design’ and ‘expert engineering’ (all on full display here, for what it’s worth), Holotype angles away from the huff, puff and hysteria. Avowedly off-piste, it skips to a musical, painterly, at times abstruse beat, in dialogue with yet disinterested in the brash and gaseous digital soundscapes of the day. ‘Popular’ music, yes, but lurking at the edges.

Defined as “the type specimen used in the original description of a species”, Holotype truly is a sonically self-contained and stringently self-generated beast, conceived, produced, mixed, mastered, assembled, packaged, printed and distributed by Orrest himself, with a gentle helping-hand from ourselves. Just as we did not all that long ago, we urge you to stumble across it.

An evolving repository of audio, artefacts and experimental interventions, run out of London.

We do vinyl / tape / digital / art objects / weird stuff no-one else likes.

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