SELVEDGE - HOLLER

Released: April 12

Coming roughly one year after his ambient drone work CAPACITY, Lawrence-based electronic artist SELVEDGE (Chance Dibben) brings us the far more glitch tinged album that is HOLLER. Dibben has always been keen on utilizing long drones and expansive atmospheres, but here he brings the expansiveness down just a bit and infuses seemingly scorched textures into otherwise gentle environments. Starting out with the first track "SEEMING AND MEANING," we get introduced with gentle pads playing odd chords as the glitches creep in behind them. The pads remain a consistent and grounding element of the tracks as the glitches intensify and the noise grows louder. This mixture becomes a theme through the rest of the runtime, much to my surprise and pleasure. 

The second track largely continues this theme, but by the third track we begin to deviate and "DEPARTURE" replaces the gentle ambient pads with something more rhythmic and abstract. Persistent rattling overtakes much of the sound space but, at the times where it abates, we get the a tonal sound that sounds as though it is being bent and warped like the thinnest sheets of metal. Later on, we get another track that plays on the same motif. "VOX OF NIGHT" brings in another abstract rhythm piece that punctuates itself around the shimmering sound of a slightly melodic tone. But even though both of these songs seem less like the noise of earlier tracks, there are still those moments in which those weird rhythms intensify to the point of aggressiveness, reminding us that this is not to be taken as a gentle experience. 

Throughout the album, Dibben mixes the strange and beautiful with the uncomfortable and harsh. The listening experience left me in something of a limbo - calm and focused, but also stimulated in an odd way. I think for me it was just all the somewhat random but entirely fitting tonal elements that shifted around during the runtime, many times sounding as though a sequence had been compacted then stretched back out and swirled around my head. The combination of this sensation with the more drone-like elements that Dibben's project is known for is spectacular and gives plenty of stereoscopic ear candy.