Post Moves is the project of Portland, OR musician Sam Wenc, who is about to release a brand new album Unison of Motion on fellow Portland label Lobby Art. Abandoning the full band sound in favour of something decidedly more personal, the album sees Post Moves take a decisive step away from the shackles of traditional folk, Wenc achieving the almost paradoxical twin steps of honing his palette to pedal steel and ethereal synthesizers, and somehow expanding his range far beyond the scope of previous releases.
The unconventional use of pedal steel is the album’s central pillar. As Lobby Art describe, “[Post Moves] stretches the confines of the pedal steel guitar to suss out the more textural & tonal elements of the instrument; it’s restorative and transfixing, putting the work more in the camp of ambient than anything else.” Feeling a sense of dissatisfaction with the conventional uses of the instrumental, Post Moves do not give up or move on, instead expanding and repurposing to find unexplored areas with the pedal steel range, utilising imagination and ambition to pull new value from what we already have.
From opener ‘The Arc of Life’, it’s clear that Wenc isn’t satisfied with traditional song structures either, abandoning any sense of verse and chorus for something altogether more patient and evocative. The track sounds deep and textured, the background atmospherics laying a gauzy, film-grained foundation upon which pedal steel winds and floats. It’s a sound that wouldn’t be out of place on Lily Tapes and Discs, possessing that same strangely meditative vibe that somehow gets to the heart of things, delving into moods and feelings that are otherwise incommunicable.
The other touchstone is Lejsovka & Freund, with whom Post Moves share a deviation to the fusion of old and new, re-utilising traditional instruments in strange and inventive ways. Like on ‘The Country Yields the City’, its pedal steel as nostalgically American as buffalo, buttes and prairie grass, before the whole thing disintegrates into snowflake synths and digital feedback. Welcome to the 21st century it seems to say. Things are weird.
There’s a certain duality between nature and simulation at work on Unison of Motion, though one which is collapsing in the contemporary moment. Post Moves conjure that enduring sense of the vast American landscape, the sense of promise and nostalgia rolled into one, though this classic dream is shaped and distorted by technology to form a hyperreal present. In the words of Lobby Art, “Post Moves make Americana about an America that makes no sense; pastoral, shambling and strange.”
This is made clear on ‘Manco Capac 648’, the ambience conjuring time as a slow, grand thing, though synths emerge to disfigure this old comfort, impinging on the sentimental view. Similarly, ‘Chigagou’ glitters uneasily, a dusky arboreal soundscape of lightning bugs and long shadows that might be just rendered digitally, while ‘The Geography of Capital’ bristles with static, again the sweeping timelessness undercut by electronic undertones. There’s always been something mournful in such music, but Post Moves adds a layer of confusion and dread, as though the loss has bite beyond the passing of time.
Closer ‘What Happens to the People’ is as patient and strangely sad as a star-strewn sky, like standing in an abandoned lot at midnight and looking upwards as the breeze blows trash around your feet and the weeds whisper against chainlink fences, neon blinking from every angle and darkness seeping between the beat, the universe as near and as far as the lives that surround you, the distant purr of vehicles, the occasional laugh or yell.
Today we are very excited to share the whole album a little while before release. It is the type of record that rewards complete listens, so put on a pair of headphones and immerse yourself.
Cover photo by Ximena Bedoya