COMMENTARY by Akira Palais

We picked up this edition quite late into the planning and construction of ÊT/RE, but moved it to the front of the release schedule because it felt like the right opening move for two reasons: 

(1) the discovery and acquisition of the edition was in accordance with an editorial line that values circularity and social affinity above aesthetics or marketable identity, and 

(2) the aesthetics/form also happen to sit comfortably outside of a particular genre, in a way that does not feel forced as if part of an abstracted experiment to invent a new market-category. 

It is well produced all the same, and succeeds in feeling just as familiar as it does strange, meaning that while it makes so much sense to us as listeners, especially those who grew up in the 90s, we can appreciate what is different about it—it is familiar enough to relate to it and trust it enough to let it show us something different. This could refer to the close positioning of hard-techno derived eruptions that are saturated in noise alongside gentle, folk-oriented moments — in this case we are valuing this, not just for how it, say, produces dynamic range, from soft to hard, but how it shows someone who likes singer-songwriter music how it can be valuable to suddenly dip out of that sound into something more intense, or it can show someone who likes techno the value of drawing techno out of its rigidity in form; some of this material could be used in a techno set, to create a moment where the quantized-sequentiality breaks down organically. 

This music asks for recognition of its uniqueness but refuses to alienate itself from other music. We see this kind of edition as an interesting response to the question of how we break out of the retromaniacal malaise of the contemporary music industry. 

We will get much more into this in an interview we have with Rose Laurel that is scheduled for release in an upcoming magazine on Becoming Press.