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Truly a beautiful collection. Sweeping through time, swelling through space, demanding you match it's pace, and bookend-ed in birdsong. I only wish it were twice as long.
Favorite track: Springtime in Croatia.
Following her debut album, 'Iâll Look for You in Others' (Past Inside the Present), earlier this year, Patricia Wolf joins Balmat label with 'See-Through', her second album. 'See Through' finds the Portland, Oregon musician and field recordist continuing to develop her signature style of ambient, balancing radiant soundscaping with a carefully expressive sensibility. But the new album is also marked by an important difference. Where 'Iâll Look for You in Others' was largely written in response to the death of a loved one, 'See-Through' represents a kind of rebirth.Â
âAfter a long period of grief, I had been hoping to find my way to a place of lightness, peace, playfulness, curiosity, and sensuality again,â Wolf says. âWhat I was surprised and pleased to find is that for the most part, I had.â
She wrote and recorded many of the albumâs songs quickly, in preparation for an August 2021 broadcast on the online radio platform 9128 Live. Excited for the opportunity to play live after more than a year of the pandemic, Wolf decided to write all new material for the event, working with a lean setup of Octatrack, Roland Synth Plus 10, Make Noise 0-Coast, and Novation Summit. (In fact, Wolf was the first sound designer invited to create patches for the Summit.) She also picked up an acoustic guitar that her brother had loaned her. âI decided to take the surrealist approach of âpure psychic automatismâ to see what poured out of me,â she recalls. âWoodland Encounter,â âUnder a Glass Bell,â âThe Grotto,â âThe Mechanical Age,â âThe Flaneur,â and âPsychic Sweepingâ are all products of those sessions; the through line holding them together is their exploratory spirit and clarity of vision.Â
Other songs, like âA Conversation With My Innocenceâ, âRecalibrationâ and âPsychic Sweepingâ, wrestle with the traumas of the preceding year. Though they may linger on the heaviness of loss, Wolf says, âWhat I discovered is that a stronger archetype had grown inside me to steer my emotions and thoughts to a better place. âLikewiseâ, âWistfulnessâ and âUpward Swimming Fishââher first experiments with VST synthesizersâbalance the bittersweet embrace of melancholy with the freedom to choose happiness.
âPacific Coast Highwayâ, the albumâs lone song with drums, might at first seem like an outlier. But it also signals Wolfâs interest in finding a fusion between the introspection of ambient and the togetherness of beat-oriented music. âExperiencing loss and isolation is what drove me into gentler territories of sound,â she says, âbut I want to start making more beat-oriented music. After an extended period of loss and isolation, Iâm ready to experience more joyous and social things.â
Listeners with keen ears might recognize the albumâs closing song, âSpringtime in Croatiaâ: A different mix of the song originally appeared on the 2021 digital compilation 'secondnature & friends Vol. II', from the Seattle label secondnature. This marks its first appearance on vinyl, however, and its spiritual home is undoubtedly here, at the close of 'See-Through'. As the bookending answer to the opening âWoodland Encounterââanother song in which field recordings play a crucial roleâit closes the circle of an album that is itself keyed to the steadily turning cycles of life.
Patricia Wolf is a musician, sound designer, and DJ residing in Portland, Oregon. Wolf uses electronics, voice, and field
recordings to produce non-linear compositions that draw listeners to a hypnotic inner world. Her use of melody and repetition manipulate the listeners' perception of time, conjuring vivid textures, and atmospheres....more
With voice, an upright piano and an old reel to reel tape deck Trappes explains, âI immersed myself in solitude and often deafening silence, and coexisted with an enormous amount of history and books" Patricia Wolf
"a journey that begins in a fire-scarred forest. The trees croak as each new gust of wind passes. Along the way, the remnants of a discovered past emerge" Patricia Wolf
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An album i liked so much, i bought it twice. Beautiful synth scapes that pull the listener into deep realms of undulating sonic shimmers and canyon shadows of dub techno. There are nods in the direction of Von Oswald's Channel but the approach is completely signature to Hoavi and it arrives with confidence. I could listen to 'Cosworth' on repeat for an hour and never tire. Neglectsound
Dreamy ambient from Tokyo's Betts(JP) that captures the impermanence of emotion in elegant washes of synth and field recordings. Bandcamp New & Notable Jun 14, 2022