ACC Records is proud to announce its first adventure beyond the archive: “executive information music” from London-based, Bulgarian-born artist AJ Pain (Stan Iordanov).
Deeply material and materially cold, yet always haunted by some kind of shimmer reminding us of a luminescence behind, U-Heads is a mineral collection of tracks that push and yield, difficult music that’s easy to fall into, neurotic at home and ecstatic in the club. The pulse is the great protagonist here – across the seven tracks we’re turning, ticking, knocking, scraping, feeling a million modulations on what a beat might be, in a panorama made up of striated and broken waves, lambent textures and metallic arabesques. From the wooden, determined gallop of "BS Prop" to the nocturnal prowl that is "Swivels" right through to "Headless", a 6 AM invocation dressed up as thuggish dancefloor banger, this is a cerebral, brave and elegant record that leaves you wondering what’s left of the idea of industrial music in a post-industry world.
From AJ Pain:
“The name is that of a waste haulier near my studio in Bermondsey and all the songs are named after objects that traverse my visual field each day – bits of scaffolding, metal shapes that connect to other metal shapes, shapes one might find stacked in a scrapyard waiting to be bolted into a load-bearing shape, or simply trying to relax after a lifetime of being under strain. The music then is also an assemblage. The best way to describe it is an accretion of information. A bit like how a crystal forms: layer by layer, each layer determining the next, and the seed, the aberrant impurity standing at the head of the recursion. The seed is the primordial material of the song, it contains already all of its temporality. Lacking a clock, the only way to relate that temporality to other layers, to grow other layers from it, is to scan each layer back into the system and record the next. It is not experimental music; it is not chaos and it is not noise. It might be called executive information music, in opposition to the noise which blackens itself to the point of silence.”
credits
released July 8, 2019
All tracks written and performed by Stan Iordanov
Vocals on "Swivels" by Tenko Nakajima
Mastered by Amir Shoat
Artwork: Stan Iordanov
Design: Giuseppe Mistretta
Production: Flora Pitrolo
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