{"product_id":"markus-floats-fourth-album-vinyl-lp","title":"Markus Floats - Fourth Album (Vinyl LP)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eDetails: \u003c\/strong\u003eThe follow-up to his acclaimed Constellation debut Third Album released in lockdown spring\r\n2020, Markus Floats returns with Fourth Album, pushing the Montréal-based artist's distinct\r\nabstract electronic compositions into newly evocative terrain (while preserving his recordtitling literalism). Faced with another couple of years spent unexpectedly, though not\r\nunfamiliarly, secluded and studio-bound, working on both paintings and music, Floats\r\nemerged by the end of 2022 with a set of tracks \"about 60% finished\" and a determined\r\ndesire to throw off the shackles of distancing and isolation. \"I had always thought about\r\nMarkus Floats as a solo project but I am wrong about that. Fourth Album is about asking for\r\nhelp, inviting in, and making a home. It's about trust, exploration, and the effort of letting go.\"\r\nSharing his in-progress recordings with a trio of close friends and collaborators from the\r\npowerhouse free music ensemble Egyptian Cotton Arkestra, each of these players then spent a\r\nday improvising to the tracks at Montréal's Hotel2Tango studio. With violin by Ari Swan,\r\nsaxophone and mbira by James Goddard, and guitar and drums by Lucas Huang, Floats\r\nstitched their extemporized instruments back into his compositional process. The result is a\r\nfluid, lustrous, dynamic expansion of his sound and structure that continues to strike the\r\nineffable balance of abstraction and soulfulness rightly highlighted and celebrated in the\r\ncritical response to Third Album. Fourth Album sustains much of that previous work's\r\nenchanting equanimity, while inviting a bit more restlessness, accident and grit, with the\r\nincorporation of acoustic instruments and improvisation melding Floats' own background in\r\nElectroacoustic Studies and Jazz Performance more than ever before.\r\nSignature avant-electronic explorations of arpeggiated and timbral transformation, subtle\r\nshifts in harmonic consonance and dissonance, and a through-composed praxis that draws\r\ncoterminously upon free jazz, musique concrète and modern Minimalism, all continue to\r\nshape Fourth Album to great effect. But an additional palette of sonic and gestural raw\r\nmaterial is now also decidedly \"out-of-the-box\", charting a wider range of gestures, textures\r\nand temporalities. Fourth Album complexifies and intensifies across it's 12 tracks, thematizing\r\ndualities and introducing new elements of play and accident, even a sort of looseness here\r\nand there, as it conjures communal expressivity within shorter, still scrupulous formal\r\nstructures. Fourth Album also for the first time includes spoken word as a recorded element,\r\npreviously only (and always) a feature of Markus Floats live performances. The album's final\r\ntrack samples the poet and activist Fred Moten, closing with these words: \"What we've been\r\ntrying to figure out how to get to is how we are when we get together to try to figure it out.\"\r\nThis koan of socially-engaged process and creation\/advancement of meaning through praxis\r\nand immanence reflects the unique fusion of intangible materiality and affective sensibility at\r\nwork in Markus Floats music, unfolding in new depths and currents with Fourth Album.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eTracklist: \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eIntroduction\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e Death\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e Free Wifi\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e As?Above\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e Interlude\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e Death (Pt. 2)\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e MDHVN\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e So?Below\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e Heaven Is Each?Other\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e Second?Introduction\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e Wands\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003e C (Featuring The?Voice?Of Fred Moten)\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ol\u003e","brand":"Markus Floats","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44004317593856,"sku":"666561017415","price":29.98,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2723\/2340\/products\/4242196-3035247.jpg?v=1698431090","url":"https:\/\/palebluedotrecords.com\/products\/markus-floats-fourth-album-vinyl-lp","provider":"Pale Blue Dot Records","version":"1.0","type":"link"}