about the record

Opening with “just keep going,” a brief recording of a reaching and plaintive out-of-tune violin—its amateurish playing nevertheless delivering a certain depth of feeling—possibly acts as a kind of mission statement: that here, we might be shown we can find meaning from the barest of means. Every song on this record is slightly cracked and seemingly concerned with detritus, each piece a careful, layered accumulation of what in other hands might be considered cast-off sounds.

The songs are almost the aural equivalent of Japanese sculptor Yuji Agematsu’s daily collection of “desirable street debris,” which he arranges in exquisite miniature displays inside the empty cellophane sleeves of old cigarette packages—each one a unique and dazzling landscape, a world unto itself. Through Zander Raymond’s improvisational approach, which employs live sampling and imaginative filtering, the most mundane sounds are refracted into a new, if fleeting, reality. The micro becomes macro, the quotidian rendered into the sublime.

In these songs, we might find doors opening, wind passing through, steam rising, or restless feet becoming grounded. A piece will sound stable—until it’s not. Patterns are set until small insertions and intrusions interrupt, and maybe a new pattern will form. Or maybe not.

One of the minor miracles of this album is how it seems, through sound, to render entropy in motion. Across its fourteen tracks, we find a thoughtful, modest reminder to notice the aleatory nature of our lives—to maybe even “notice the fly,” as it were.