We last featured Post Moves, the project of Massachusetts-based Sam Wenc, back in January when we wrote about his album No Dignity in Haste. The record was what we described as “an aural collage that combines experimental electronics with finger picked American Primitive,” and captured perfectly the Post Moves aesthetic of combining electronic elements with the earthy sounds of guitar and pedal steel. Now Wenc is back with a new Post Moves album, Cut Into Your Own Dimension, released on Providence, Rhode Island label Noumenal Loom.
Opening track ‘George Through the Window’ sets the tone, combining winding pedal steel with synthesizers that sparkle like a 90s science documentary. It captures something intangible, this synergy of glittering wonder and the sawing ache of something altogether more poignant. These twin forces of wonderment and reflection are the album’s key thematic motifs too, as Wenc meditates on the people who have touched his life in a variety of ways. “The album in general is centered around an acknowledgement of the impact and forces of figures both close and distant in my life,” Wenc says in a piece with Backseat Mafia. “My aim was to honor the composition of these people in shaping my existence (the album name acting as a directive to myself to investigate these forces further).”
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=3122341675 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=2924208519]
From the jerkily robotic opening of ‘Karen’s Ride With Grace’ to the zen-like stillness at the centre of ‘Bob’s Peace in West Texas,’ Cut Into Your Own Dimension never settles in one place, experimenting with molding the constituent parts into new shapes. There’s an uneasy sense of surrealism on ‘Ira Arrives for Purim’, opening with screeched glitching and a clipped vocal sample, before cutting immediately to another garbled sample, this time supported by melancholic swells of subdued synths. The effect is one of a collaged dreamscape, a juxtaposition of harsh and oddly subdued of which David Lynch would be proud.
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=3122341675 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=826412807]
Cut Into Your Own Dimension is out now on Noumenal Loom and you can get it on cassette or digital via Bandcamp. 50% of the proceeds will be donated to Pa’lante, a restorative justice program based in Holyoke, MA working to build youth power and dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline.
