max alper :: american history sex

It is a personal honor and pleasure to debut Max Alper‘s sixth solo collection, American History Sex, as the most recent addition to our group hug. Split into three chapters, the album provides three radical perspectives on the theme of inherent progress in maturation and becoming a part of the natural order among the self. Each chapter serves as coinciding explorations into time, and the methods in which varying applications of sounds can invalidate temporality altogether. Chapters A, B, and C are a discussion which sum two years of Max’s life beginning in the autumn of ’09, and it is up to the listener to take position among the present dialogue.

Part A [download] is a presentation of sounds that coincide to become songs, both voice and instrumentation becoming the victim of oppression by the other. Lyrically, the narrative is an assault upon the body and what is therefor psychically perceived to be truth when a visual reality has failed. The sky which humanity knows as a ceiling has become an empirical storm, and it is all we can do to stand by one another and develop our own eyes within the clouds above. These sounds are a single beacon, all of which bear equal importance, in the rallying cries for assembly.

Part B [download] is a pasture of free range compositions, or rather compartmentalized communities that consciously bear relevance to one another. Drum circles gather among the shadows of great trees while up the hill the boy who lays on the keys of his piano cries in his sleep. Hindustani ragas permeate our foundation as we approach aural temporality at the macroscopic level, charting melodies for architecture and belief in reshaping the visual.

Part C [download] is deliberately physical, a union for progression within a wall-to-wall piano composition. The revolution is subtle, but not without fantastic and whimsical texture. This is not a “part c” in which time has decreed an exponential linear progression, but a “part c” that is just as woven within “part a” and “part b” as “part b” and “part a” are as a component of “part c”. Here is the choreography for which our legs will want to follow, now understand where to teach them patience and restraint without neglecting the pleasures of experience.

Exposure to these three chapters is an incredibly intimate and seductive experience. What is it like to crawl through these headphones and momentarily coexist with the representation of these thoughts… with this friends’ performance of mind? American History Sex is a liberation, we’ll see you on the way through. Tracklist after the jump.

B.
1. Free 1
2. Trap Dissection
3. Gurgles
4. Treeman vs. Treeman
5. Piano Alap
6. Tōhoku Mourner Meditation (for electric guitar+tape)

C.
1. Ann Arbor, In January
2. Ijawawa! (Dans la Forêt Enchantée de Papillons)
3. Da De
4. Dodge
5. Debussy Getting Buried By Alabama Baptists