about the record

On After The Town Was Swept Away, BlankFor.ms, aka Tyler Gilmore, finds in rhythm a new vocabulary of self-collection. Confronting both grief and joy, its twelve tracks of tape loop manipulation festoon and murmur, the imperfect cyclicality of tape itself at once a metaphor for the record’s meditations on time and the physical support shaping its sounds.

Composed in the aftermath of two quickly succeeding, life-changing events for the artist, the birth of his first child, Ellis, in November 2023, and the loss of his mother after a two-year battle with cancer in January 2024, the sounds of After The Town Was Swept Away were born of unmaking and remaking. The compositional process was largely one of revision. Early drum machine sketches were emptied out and degraded, whole songs restructured, tape loops stacked to digest a complex rhythmic biography. Rooted in early experiences in jazz and a long-held love of house and drum and bass, BlankFor.ms’ beat allegiances surface in ways that are never obvious, serving as a vehicle for reinterpreting one’s times anew.

Commanding such an articulate rhythmic language, the music of After The Town Was Swept Away speaks in intense, affectionate, and at times uneasy tones. This is felt deeply on lead single “Formed by the Slide.” Against offbeat loops of quietly loose, layered held-tone vocals by composer, vocalist, and friend of the artist Ella Joy Meir, rhythm emerges in noisier surges, as if answering their achingly beautiful call. It is the sound of experience in its barest form. When life speaks, we respond as we can.

After The Town Was Swept Away was born from love, not only in tender musing but through actual, felt communion. This is evident, for example, in the triptych titled after Kinship, the Highland Park yoga studio where, in 2024, experimentalist Colloboh hosted BlankFor.ms for an impromptu performance set to a routine by yogi Meg Shoemaker, from which the three tracks were assembled. The influence of others is also present throughout the record, both musical, as with jazz drummer Marcus Gilmore and pianist Jason Moran, with whom BlankFor.ms recently released a collaborative album, and more intimately personal, all bound together through rhythm.

Could it be otherwise? Tape loops have a way of preserving and altering the past at once, marking and unmarking sounds and their sources. The beats on After The Town Was Swept Away come to terms with just that, pensively yet felicitously, their rethreaded rhythms making room for unexpected, unhoped-for recollection, a way to survive the flood of experience.