Remember when, back in November, we featured Philadelphia ambient project naps? Jason Calhoun released a great cassette titled one hundred percent confident on Lily Tapes and Discs which we described as “an oddly beautiful brand of ambient drone”. Now naps is back with a new release, the cryptically titled ft, and it’s every bit as strange and lovely as its predecessor.
The six tracks that make up ft are actually more like just one, snatches of melody arising from feedback and a humming near-silence, an observation supported by their names, each just a part of the whole. Opener ‘ft 1’ is all burbling electronics and crackly white noise that sounds almost like lapping waves, existing on that uncanny line where the digital begins to appear organic. ‘ft 2’ follows a similar pattern, the background drone hollow and round at the edges, the sounds at the foreground distorted into seemingly random squiggles. ‘ft 3’ feels transient, all murmurs and little flitting gusts, while ‘ft 4’ is has a muffled percussive feel, like distant fireworks or a wallet left in the washing machine, before strange garbled samples of children’s voices (which are far more comforting than that description sounds). ‘ft 5’ is an electronic haze, like the steam from a bathtub messing with your portable TV, before it blips away into ‘ft 6’, with its supercomputer bleeps and whirs and background rumble.
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ft is a short and strange release, but one I enjoyed immensely, playing it three times over on my first listen. It lacks the cold and calculated purpose of much electronic music, somehow feeling like finding shards of beauty across the radio dial’s no-mans-land in the depths of night, a thousand sources of energy and interference buzzing and glitching into a collage that feels soft and gentle and almost organic. Like a midnight ecosystem that’s invisible to the masses, received serendipitously by late night drivers and insomniacs, an electronic blanket to wrap around their quiet and mundane lives.
You can get ft as a name-your-price download, or on cassette complete with hand-stitched case via the naps Bandcamp.
Cassette case designed and sewn by Deeann Calhoun, artwork by Benjamin Torrey