A New Found Relaxation

Ambient album by the drummer from Big Thief; James Krivchenia. A New Found Relaxation is a refinement of Krivchenia’s method of transforming concrete found material into abstract crystals that still shine with their original glow. Realized in spring of 2019 in the tiny town in New Mexico where he was living at the time, A New Found Relaxation is made from hundreds of tiny fragments of internet spa radio, ASMR youtube holes, field recordings and cast off muzak, processed through Krivchenia’s magic box of extreme outboard manipulations. This mass of fragments was then organized into an album- like frame that maintains this elusive balance between the surfacey calm of spa radio and the frenetic effects of the hyperreal processing. This balance illuminates the deep-structural mania of a globalized world ensnared in the internet, the ever-quickening global whirl of information and capitalism, the tenuousness of our collective life in unprecedented isolation. But it does so without obliterating the spiritual glow of that world, that information, that life. This record is far from a joke at spa radio’s expense: on the contrary, the calming, healing presence of the much-maligned new age/background music is taken up with care and appreciation. It’s just that the frantic energy that carries this calm is lifted up and made audible within it. Still relaxing, sure, but a relaxation we might have to grow accustomed to: a new found relaxation.