Bass Communion’s The Itself Of Itself offers an approach that draws from musique concrete, noise music, abstract electronics and uneasy listening. 

 

Whilst still rippled with the same shades of light and dark that can be found throughout all of Bass Communion’s work, The Itself Of Itself reveals a fascination with analogue sounds and, more importantly perhaps, ‘unwanted’ analogue artefacts such as tape hiss, wow and flutter, static noise, and sonic break-up. 

 

A dynamic listening experience where unease, dread and comparatively claustrophobic torrents of sound make (un)natural bedfellows to moments of enchantment and serenity.

 

Presented in a wonderful Carl Glover cover with a 24 page booklet of his photographs and an obi strip.

 

Limited to 1-per-person

 

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‘Apparition 3’ presents a stark nod to Wilson's established command of shifting textures steeped in penumbral gauze, while ‘Bruise’ is akin to a space probe adrift and headed towards a white dwarf as all communication is reduced to a disturbing and indecipherable crackle.

 

Between the other five cuts we witness fragmented, garbled and buried voices, vast vacillating banks of grainy hum, what sounds like the dying gasps of an oboe, spooky swirls from an indiscernible source, swathes of tape hiss, moody drones, and spiralling slivers of noise. Meanwhile on the title track, a mellotron flute rusts and collapses in on itself in a way that renders it the very antithesis of the one deployed on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.