{"title":"Markus Floats","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"fourth-album","title":"Fourth Album","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe Montréal-based avant-garde electronic composer \/ producer follows up his acclaimed Third Album, rallying players from local improv group Egyptian Cotton Arkestra to add new electroacoustic materiality to his abstract soul.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe follow-up to his acclaimed Constellation debut Third Album released in lockdown spring 2020, Markus Floats returns with \u003ci\u003eFourth Album\u003c\/i\u003e, pushing the Montréal-based artist’s distinct abstract electronic compositions into newly evocative terrain (while preserving his record- titling literalism). Faced with another couple of years spent unexpectedly, though not unfamiliarly, secluded and studio-bound, working on both paintings and music, Floats emerged by the end of 2022 with a set of tracks “about 60% finished” and a determined desire to throw off the shackles of distancing and isolation. “I had always thought about Markus Floats as a solo project but I am wrong about that. Fourth Album is about asking for help, inviting in, and making a home. It’s about trust, exploration, and the effort of letting go.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSharing his in-progress recordings with a trio of close friends and collaborators from the powerhouse free music ensemble Egyptian Cotton Arkestra, each of these players then spent a day improvising to the tracks at Montréal’s Hotel2Tango studio. With violin by Ari Swan, saxophone and mbira by James Goddard, and guitar and drums by Lucas Huang, Floats stitched their extemporized instruments back into his compositional process. The result is a fluid, lustrous, dynamic expansion of his sound and structure that continues to strike the ineffable balance of abstraction and soulfulness rightly highlighted and celebrated in the critical response to Third Album. \u003ci\u003eFourth Album\u003c\/i\u003e sustains much of that previous work’s enchanting equanimity, while inviting a bit more restlessness, accident and grit, with the incorporation of acoustic instruments and improvisation melding Floats’ own background in Electroacoustic Studies and Jazz Performance more than ever before.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSignature avant-electronic explorations of arpeggiated and timbral transformation, subtle shifts in harmonic consonance and dissonance, and a through-composed praxis that draws coterminously upon free jazz, musique concrète and modern Minimalism, all continue to shape Fourth Album to great effect. But an additional palette of sonic and gestural raw material is now also decidedly “out-of-the-box”, charting a wider range of gestures, textures and temporalities. \u003ci\u003eFourth Album\u003c\/i\u003e complexifies and intensifies across its 12 tracks, thematizing dualities and introducing new elements of play and accident, even a sort of looseness here and there, as it conjures communal expressivity within shorter, still scrupulous formal structures. Fourth Album also for the first time includes spoken word as a recorded element, previously only (and always) a feature of Markus Floats live performances. The album’s final track samples the poet and activist Fred Moten, closing with these words: “What we’ve been trying to figure out how to get to is how we are when we get together to try to figure it out.” This koan of socially-engaged process and creation\/advancement of meaning through praxis and immanence reflects the unique fusion of intangible materiality and affective sensibility at work in Markus Floats music, unfolding in new depths and currents with \u003ci\u003eFourth Album\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor fans of Terry Riley, Klein, Nosaj Thing, Floating Points, Deru, Joshua Abrams\/Town And Country, Flying Lotus, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Sarah Hennies, Jan Jelinek\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Constellation","offers":[{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":50394299171147,"sku":"2053114","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50394298843467,"sku":"2053113","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/d351b5cb-5423-ccc3-5cb0-8469dc7fbbbf_ec12d628_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726435899"},{"product_id":"third-album","title":"Third Album","description":"\u003cp\u003eFor fans of Vangelis, Dedekind Cut, James Ferraro, Oren Ambarchi, Christian Fennesz, Terry Riley. \u003ci\u003eThird Album\u003c\/i\u003e is the Constellation debut from Montréal-based multi-disciplinary artist and musician \/ composer Markus Lake, an active force in the city’s DIY music community who’s been releasing synthetic audio works under the Markus Floats moniker over the past decade – alongside playing bass in wide range of punk, post-punk, experimental and Afrofuturist outfits (including Elle Barbara’s Black Space) and co-founding the local indie music space Drones Club. With a background in Jazz Performance and Electroacoustic Studies, Lake’s solo work is also guided by a painterly sensibility, and informed by a variety of conceptual interests: non-linear narrative composition; sonic simulacra and naturalizing the digital; poptimism vs avant-gardism; the attentive\/ceremonial possibilities of 21st century ‘music for speakers’ (and headphones) in a culture of bombast, nostalgia, and immediate gratification. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe music of Markus Floats might best be described as idiosyncratic aural Abstract Expressionism, where melodic gestures, sequenced pulses, atonal clusters and granulated textures are arranged like shapes and strokes of timbral hue and depth. Using primarily in-the-box midi instruments, along with a handful of samples and field recordings, Third Album is through-composed and atypically but unfailingly expressive – like ruminative action painting in sound. Synthetic notes and chords extrapolate in transitory semi-improvised harmonic and melodic themes, often referencing organ sounds of alternately liturgical and souljazz resonance. The album combines a sort of incantatory, exploratory, desecrated dark lounge with more formal touchstones of electronic composition, where arpeggiators surface and recede amidst shifting drones, distortions and dissonances. The result is a highly original, succinct and lucid set of syntheticelectronic tracks that defies genre: brimming with ideas but not overworked; methodical and discreet but not unassuming or underplayed; deeply integrated in its own ineffable, evocative chronicle of colour, shape and space.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThird Album\u003c\/i\u003e is a wonderfully distinctive work of leftfield electronic composition and the most distilled music Markus Floats has recorded to date. (In concert, each Floats live performance is specific and unique: he combines his soundscapes with carefully selected spoken word recordings from the black literary canon.) \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Constellation","offers":[{"title":"Black | LP","offer_id":50498786066763,"sku":"1092018","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/65916039-2737-4460-9a35-540ec2180431_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727757299"}],"url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/fr\/collections\/markus-floats.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}