His new album Recall the Dream Breath, out via Moone Records and Lobby Art, might have been released under the slightly different moniker of Post Moves & The Sound Memory Ensemble, but it is still very much his project. Apart from a couple of notable cameos (more on which later), it’s essentially a solo record, the name more of a thematic choice rather than a practical one, as Wenc describes:

“I wanted a listener to perhaps get the feeling that there was a larger group at work. With the album title and name of the ensemble, both have an associated verb/action with them. Both concerning dreams and/or memories, I liked the idea of the music scoring these moments where we cue information culled from dreams/memories as a way of situating ourselves in our present state. The placelessness of memories and their role in us finding place in the present.”

Written almost entirely during pandemic-era lockdowns, Heart Music was a wonderfully dense, knotty affair, built around percussion in a deliberately disordered, thematically complex manner that gave little thought to live performance. But Recall the Dream Breath feels different from the outset. It is stripped back, decluttered, both in terms of the instruments used (pedal steel returns as the main player, along with bass and banjo) and the underlying atmosphere. Intuition and experimentation are still important, but here they are unshackled from the contextual intricacies of the previous record. The result is something freer, a widescreen meandering journey through dreams and memories as a means to better situate the listener in their present.

This is apparent from opener ‘Grief Fields’. Sparse lines of pedal steel are left to wander against a softly quiet backdrop like streaks of dawn cloud. But from the halfway point it begins to gather momentum, the slow beat of percussion heralding the arrival of additional instrumentation that rises in a dramatic crest. This eventually subsides, leaving behind a solitary banjo and a hushed sense of post-storm calm, and with the sense of having been through something and emerged on the other side.

Whereas Heart Music was created over a year and a half, Recall the Dream Breath was completed quickly, written and recorded in just two weeks in the spring of 2021. The first two tracks, roughly the record’s Side A, were composed in advance, a level of pre-planning that is new to Wenc’s creative process, while the rest were broadly improvised or written during recording. A genuine blend of construction and intuition which allowed him to arrive with a solid base to build upon, and therefore commit more freely to the directions which suggested themselves in the moment.

‘Lorraine’ sees this happen in real time, opening with a composed arrangement and slowly unfurling into improvisation. The sound is accompanied by a poem read by Kyle Field (of Little Wings), one of two central collaborations on the record which further the quasi-imaginary ensemble of the Post Moves & The Sound Memory name. “The oversight available on the high cliff’s crag as the wind must’ve blown a page free,” Field reads, “I am the clairvoyance which can truly at times be hard on a body, letting the web loose, shook with wild breeze on the thought pattern and a focus on no repeating words.” It’s the mood of the record put into words, where dreaminess meets physicality in a way only possible in memories—details, textures, feelings existing within an abstract space.

The soft pulse drone of ‘The Ladder’s Shadow’ appears foreboding at first but alters as the pedal steel drifts its way in, existing as some large or ancient thing beyond view, before Deerhoof’s John Dieterich joins on ‘Electric Pasture’ with guitars and effects that elevate the track to a soundscape fully worthy of its name. Closer ‘The Suicide Tree’ is perhaps the most cinematic piece on the record, the slow swell of ambient textures and bright specks of strings layered over field recordings of everyday life—children’s voices and the nameless ambience of not-silence that surrounds us always. The final third changes tack, switching to audio from an educational film about trees as the rich atmosphere dims to nothing, replaced with needling drones that buzz and whir like honeybees before clanking and sputtering to a discordant, almost disconcerting, finish.

Recall the Dream Breath is out now via Moone Records and Lobby Art. Het it now via Bandcamp.

Cover design by Danika Vandersteen

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Next Month, Old Saw will release a new record, Country Tropics, on Lobby Art. Comprised of just four tracks, the album is the perfect introduction to the Old Saw ethos, combining elements of folk, country, ambient and drone into long bending hymns to the American landscape in all its beauty and disorder. It’s as patient as the seasons, finding wonder and devotion not in the cotton-wool clouds of some celestial realm but the dust, dirt and decay of the here and now.

The result is something unique, an atmosphere quite unlike any other. Country Tropics evokes an ambience of prayer-like solemnity that celebrates something decidedly terrestrial, what the label describe as “a rusted and granular shadow world where the dive bar meets the divine.” It recalls one of those junkyard shrines built by some sincere eccentric, improbably wonderful forms of weathered stone and scrap metal standing like totems to an unrecognised religion rooted in the earth around us. As Lobby Art continues, Country Tropics approaches this broken and corroded world “as an iceberg,” the ensemble “dredg[ing] up silt, clay, weeds, and trash to craft a more holy image of our tattered landscape.”

Today we have the pleasure of unveiling the record’s closing track, ‘Chewing the Bridle.’ Surfacing from a single ambient tone, the song unveils its textures with slow grace, the various elements coalescing around the pure drone bedrock to achieve a sacred air. But rather than being transportive, the sound is anchored by that which surrounds it. Concerned not with the looming sky or unseen heavens or even the refuge of one’s own mind, but very ground before us. Old Saw give us devotional music folded back on itself, ethereality inverted, arms aloft and palms out, digging into the tactile dirt.

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The result however, is very different. Seduced by the endlessly inventive ideas in his head, Ben Varian throws away this elegant notion in favour of something more complex and elusive. One Hundred Breakfasts with the Book chases dream pop, not as a genre, but a literal goal. Of course, nothing can survive the mental/material gap intact, and what emerges is a nebulous, playful collection of songs. Part Herbie Hancock, part Steely Dan, with a touch of David Berman for good measure. An album that tears up the rule book and genre expectations to become, essentially, the antithesis of its original intention.

“Goal setting in late capitalism eerily reflects the very things that are unattainable in a capitalistic structure,” the press release describes. “Solidity and assuredness are for those who can afford it. Impermanence and instability for the rest.” It is futile to strive for perfection, yet the entire culture runs on such a chase. In both recognising this trap and falling for it, Ben Varian is an artist very much of this moment—where even your dreams work against you and self-awareness makes little difference. A songwriter able to weave zany, sardonic stories of being alive at this time, tales told not from some bird’s-eye vantage but right down in the trenches next to you, and as susceptible to the conditions as anyone else.

Ben Varian unveiled the title track as the first taste of the album a little while back—a slice of laidback pop that evokes dried-out paint brushes, peeling sunburn and episodes of Frasier, capping things off with a languid guitar solo. Today, we’re thrilled to share a brand new single, ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’, a track which continues this mood with a light jazz style, complete with tongue-in-cheek spoken word segments (and French translation) that blur the line between profundity and absurdity. “I hear a door close,” explains the voice in the first, “or maybe just a big sneeze down the hall / I’ll read it in tomorrow’s paper / He packed up his crockpot and skipped town.” And therein lies the spirit of Ben Varian. Fun, weird, sometimes sad, and always imperfect. Because that’s how things work, and these are the times in which we live.

I don’t want to touch the thermostat
I don’t think I can sweat like that
I don’t want to learn to live with less
I don’t want to take off the dress

I know what is right,
and I know that I might
be wrong

One Hundred Breakfasts with the Book is out on the 29th January via Lobby Art and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

Photo and album design by Allyson Pierce

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This month sees Dylan M. Howe team up with Lobby Art to release Southern Gap, the first proper album under his own name. Building upon the foundations of his previous work, the record finds an artist at the height of his powers, the ten years of groundwork leading to a newfound clarity and assurance. “Southern Gap is a confident gesture,” writes Sam Wenc (AKA Post Moves). “A patient and pensive collection of tracks that point to an artist valuing growth, expansion and peace with the palette in which they color their world.”

Thematically, Southern Gap is concerned with the empty and the derelict, evoking structures stripped of their intended purpose, left as monuments to a sense of hope and ambition that has long since receded into irrelevance. “This is music for buildings that no longer serve a human purpose,” Howe explains. “A sonic embodiment of spaces that were once meant for dwelling but can’t function as such.”

The pervasive drone of opener ‘Arcade Flutes’ conjures such spaces, housing nothing beyond draughts and damp air and a creeping sense of loss. The melodica and other sounds warbling beneath the tone are echoes of a squandered future, old energies vibrating, haunting, merged now with the creak of the wind and drip of the walls. Community, it seems, has long since departed from Howe’s world. Only isolation and its steady decay are waiting for us now.

Its downbeat opening spoken word segment like some elegy for lost things, ‘Ritual For Conscious Dying’ continues such ideas, pushing a brooding ambient sound toward a subtle dub beat. In shading its melancholic spirit with an ominous edge, the track is suggestive of some dark force within time, or perhaps some ulterior timelessness, a lurking menace that will outlast us and our plans, and sweep into the hollow remains when all else is gutted. Is it any wonder then that we spend to much time looking backward, towards the past?

There’s a near geological weight to ‘Ninety Blocks’, its organ hum needling high and falling again, an earth force of rock and gas and heat. Wenc draws an accurate comparison to the work of Kali Malone, the track sharing the same willingness, be it patience or bravery or resolve, that made The Sacrificial Code so besetting and moving. With its delicate rumbling synths and cyclical discordant samples, closer ‘Courtyard’ brings to mind other sources, the sinister industrial dread of Pye Corner Audio blended with the atonal, obscured violence of Dean Hurley’s work on Twin Peaks. The track is a fitting conclusion, painting a world in which echoes rise to replace all things and mourning this loss with a plaintive, wounded hum.

We’re delighted to share the record in full a few days early, so grab your headphones and dig in below:

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That’s not to say that these songs are inspired by huge, life-changing events. Rather, they focus on those small moments that leave a relatively large impression. The tracklisting gives some idea of the type of experiences in question: ‘Bike Ride Under Big Moon’, ‘Fast Car’, ‘Hoop Hymn’, and ‘Light Lands On A Cool Field’ to name a few. As label Lobby Art describe, “Peters distils life’s sweet moments into mantra-like offerings; a didactic sermon to live slowly and appreciate your surroundings. As Peters puts it, ‘the basic idea’.”

Today we are excited to share the video for the track, ‘Phone Talk’. From the opening notes, you get an impression of the type of emotions Stevhen Peters wants to conjure, an electronic devotion that evokes a bright wonder, a headspace unique to sunny mornings or vacation days. Peters is here to jolt us from the track of everyday existence and prove that such a disposition is attainable on even the most mundane of Mondays. What’s more, the result plays not as some forced New Age mindfulness but rather a plainly obvious suggestion. Rush less, look further, and we might just appreciate being alive that little bit more.

You Can Accommodate All You Want is set for release on the 24th August via Lobby Art and you can pre-order it via Bandcamp.

Photo by Isaac Schneider

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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

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