RUSSELL HASWELL SHARES ADVERSE INFERENCE DIGITAL EP
+ REALITY THERAPY – ALBUM INSPIRED BY REAL-TIME ABSORPTION OF IMAGES - OUT 22 SEP VIA DIAGONAL RECORDS
+ LISTEN TO ‘ADVERSE INFERENCE (EXTENDED EDIT)’
+ SPECIAL VISUAL COLLABORATION WITH GRAPHIC DESIGN COMPANY MUIR MCNEIL
+ PRE-ORDER CD / DIGITAL
“The veteran electronic antagonist creates wonder out of almost nothing – a hissing snare, rib-prodding blips, a far-off shiver of bowed strings” – The Guardian playlist
“… representing a tentative tilt towards better days to come” – Electronic Sound
Russell Haswell has shared a digital EP, Adverse Inference. The EP features three edits of tracks that appear on his forthcoming album, Reality Therapy, set for release on 22 September 2023 via long-time partners in crime Diagonal.
Listen to ‘Adverse Inference (Extended Edit)’: https://youtu.be/W7W2DEjByhk
Also featured on the EP are the video edit for first track, ‘Availability Heuristic’, which recently featured on The Guardian’s playlist, plus an edit of ‘Pegasus’, which appears on this month’s Electronic Sound covermount.
The album is accompanied by a special visual collaboration with Muir McNeil, the UK graphic design company whose activities focus on systematic and algorithmic methods in type design, graphic design and moving image. Paul and Hamish have previously worked with Factory Records / Hacienda, Juan Atkins, Durutti Column and more. Haswell himself has released music on Warp, Warner Classics, Editions Mego; he has curated shows for galleries including New York’s PS1 and TBA 21 in Vienna, and collaborated with the likes of Merzbow, Florian Hecker, Pain Jerk and Yasunao Tone. This new work, his first on Diagonal since 37 Minute Workout Vol. 2 in 2019, is a response to absorbing real-time live feeds on YouTube of breaking stories broadcast by news-gathering agencies in and around the Covid period. Across ten divergent tracks, Russell makes connections to his youth, to a political climate punctuated by strikes, class-war and protest.
“The themes and styles that I selected reflect what I saw going on in the world around me during this weird time that we all went through . . . The imprisonment of Navalny, Covid lockdowns and the shambolic government - I couldn’t help feeling the similarities to the 80s and early 90s, and so the music includes stylistic themes and sound references to that period transposed into a more positive and humorous light.”
Coventry (or ‘COV!’) also helped to inspire Retail Therapy. The 12-minute bubblebath ‘Transparent Introspection’ surfaced when Haswell was preparing to perform live in Coventry Cathedral as part of his home town’s City of Culture 2021 programme: “I’ve been to that cathedral so many times. I thought, what am I going to do for this? I realised I had to do something more synthetic, more ambient, more choral, because the place is a reverberant nightmare.”
To mark this new sonic event, Muir McNeil have generated a custom typeface using layered intersections of two fonts from their Two Type System that are interpolated across the database to generate millions of hybrid forms in which every dot, line, space and letter correspond and collaborate. System Process Form, a forthcoming publication from Unit Editions, documents the Two Type System’s development in detail, along with the thinking that underpins it.
Album pre-order: https://russellhaswell1.bandcamp.com/album/reality-therapy-diag062
Availability Heuristic video by Muir McNeil: https://youtu.be/Ny1UP3zfxEQ
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