why we love this

Piercing the ear as if passing through thick glass walls, its metallic architecture gradually builds, only to dissolve into a multitude of micro-sounds that fluidly transition into another wave of tension.

about the record

Northern Irish, London-based musician Michael Speers composes and performs music as a temporal and worldly extension of himself and the tools at his disposition. As a percussionist by training, Michael extends his contact and interplay with resonant objects through instrumentalized amplification and feedback, employing signal processing to articulate the almost tangible constitution of sonic material as structural, nearly cellular, microscopic entities.

Following his integral presence in C.A.N.V.A.S. performance events and his participation in the Cipher compilation, xtr’ctn is released in September 2019 as a debut solo LP for both the artist and the label.

This is fictional music - it is of and for a world that doesn’t exist. Although presenting sound with sincerity and integrity, without allusion to linear narrative, Michael's materialistic approach is transcended by the sensitivity of his composition. In a sense, it comes after both feeling and expression, as the subdued emotion of a person attempting to reach beyond their own affective limitations. It reaches out without ever really touching anything. Yet for all its clinical reduction, there are moments of unhindered emotion which strike harder for their arrival from such a seemingly nonhuman place.