Almost here—just on the horizon—is a very special album to be released on cassette by that most eclectic of labels out of Kansas City, Overland Shark, run by the inspired and inspiring Andrew Heuback.
Entitled Suburban Electrification, this is quite an unusual album for me: 13 short synthesizer ‘miniatures’ that occupy relatively unusual territory in comparison to what’s gone before.
The album was put together with the notion of restricted instrumentation (i.e. one synthesizer) and short duration in mind: the challenge was to create pieces that convey the same emotional impact as my longform works. I don’t know if I succeeded, but it was fun creating the music on this album and it’s informed quite a bit of what I’ve recorded in the four or five months since I finished it.
The album will be released mid- to late-July 2011. You can preorder it here in both digital and cassette tape formats, although if you order the tape, you’ll also get a high quality download of the album in your choice of 320k mp3, FLAC or other digital formats. It can also be streamed in its entirety from that page.
OMG Vinyl had this to say:
In case we haven’t convinced you yet, let us say it again, Kansas’ Overland Shark is easily one of the best tape labels in existence. They’ve got two new releases up, both amazing and incredibly different from one another. Brian Lavelle’s “Suburban Electrification” is a near-perfect collection of short, precise synthesizer jams (quite different from his usual multi-instrumental, side-long movements). The genre conventions of drone and ambient are left behind, revealing fields of minimal electronic music ripe for cultivation. This one is fucking tops.
Following this album are two other releases on cassette: Amulets, on Digitalis; and Empty Transmissions, on Sonic Oyster Cassettes. 2011 is the year of the tape, it seems…
