Mapping Azure by BAG
Transatlantic duo Dan Allison (London, UK) and Jody DeSchutter (BC, Canada).
Reconfigured field recordings, synths, vocals, homemade instruments and loops scaffold or entomb DeSchutter’s Dada-esque words, allowing the listener to co-navigate the landscape.
Mapping Azure review in 'The Quietus' 'Spools Out' article 'Best tapes of 2020' by Daryl Worthington
'How do you describe a colour to someone who’s never seen it? How do you map a cloudless sky? These are the sorts of questions of communication BAG, the duo of Brit Dan Allison and Canadian Jody DeSchutter seem to engage with on debut tape Mapping Azure. The combination of electronics, field recordings and poetry are simultaneously vivid and vague. Clusters of words are read, often without obvious connection, but this isn’t a completely random language soup. Constellations start to form so that even if sense doesn’t fully appear, its echo does. The accompanying soundscape has a similar effect, shifting from almost inaudible pulses to pristine arpeggios and lurking beats. It occasionally seems at odds with the poems, but maybe that distance is where the real meaning lies?
Mapping Azure seems to dig at the very essence of communication. When we reach the limit of vocabulary we resort to metaphor or describing the effect of something rather than the thing itself. That seems to be the case with BAG’s music, a weird schematic of something unknown that can only be conveyed through allusion.'
thequietus.com/articles/29322-the-best-of-spools-out-2020
Their debut release, Mapping Azure, breathes fractured and cyclic narrative-like nonsense into vast soundscapes and pulses. It pushes forward over mountain and valley like breath, like water, like sky.
Strange worlds are journeyed and mapped; sounds and words dissolve into colour and back again.
Originally released on cassette September 26, 2020
Tracklist
| 1. | A Probability of Process | 11:10 |
| 2. | The Molecular Weight of Water | 2:59 |
| 3. | Interlude | 1:40 |
| 4. | Skin of the World | 2:28 |
| 5. | Function | 2:41 |
| 6. | Shifting | 1:59 |
| 7. | Flower Feet | 0:48 |
| 8. | Ode to Slug | 3:18 |
| 9. | Transit | 1:53 |
| 10. | Tender Tribe | 5:20 |
Credits
All tracks written by BAG (Jody DeSchutter and Daniel Allison)
Interlude, Skin of the World and Ode to Slug feature Natalie Dzbik
Recorded and mastered by BAG
Released by Bloxham Tapes (BT24)
Design by Luke Drozd
