New York, NY (Top40 Charts) New York based percussionist and composer Eli Keszler announces Icons+ - a deluxe edition of his latest album with two new songs - available now on elikeszler.com. At a time where albums are often reduced to a single compressed digital product, distributed ad infinitum, Icons+ is a statement on form. The album - featuring immersive recordings gathered in Croatia and New York pre and during the pandemic - has been committed to a range of original formats by LUCKYME Records. This line includes a cassette edition (in mono), a vinyl repress (in stereo), the intended Mach1 Spatial (in 3D) audio mix as well as a digital conform from Mach1 Spatial to Dolby Atmos (in 7.1.2 surround) for mainstream DSPs. Beyond the mere auditory experience, Keszler has partnered with Brooklyn candlemaker Joya Studio to create a companion for the album: created to evoke Chinatown and the Odysseus Cave. All physical objects come with a digital stereo version of Icons+.
Of these many formats, the most groundbreaking is Mach1 Spatial, a new agnostic audio format for spatial audio. Unlike other spatial formats, with Mach1 Spatial all surround, spatial and multichannel rendered mixes are ingestible or renderable without alteration to the sound field. When listening on compatible equipment (including Gen2 Apple AirPods Pro, any Bose headphones since 2018, with many more options on the way) recordings are mapped around the user's perspective utilizing AR head tracking technology, giving listeners the opportunity to move around and explore sound in 3 dimensions in extremely high detail. "Mach1 Spatial
System offered the chance to realize what I set out for with Icons originally," states Keszler. "To create a fully immersive experience of being able to walk through these recordings with infinite angles and perspectives instead of listening to them from a fixed point. I want the listener to experience what I did walking through empty New York, the feeling of being a single point in an ever changing field. Mach1 Spatial offers unprecedented detail. I felt compelled to collaborate with Dražen Bošnjak and the Mach1 team to offer this 3 dimensional experience to help understand and explore the full potential of spatial sound."
Icons+ is an immersive work in perpetual motion, evoking a glorious and dystopian western world. Known as a frequent collaborator to Oneohtrix Point Never, Laurel Halo,
Kevin Beasley, Rashad Becker, and Skrillex, Keszler's latest solo venture offers up a latticework of melodic percussion, drum set, and electro-acoustic instrumentation, built upon fragments of American abstraction, ancient scales, industrial percussion, and jazz-age film noir to achieve its feeling of imperial decay. Keszler's instrumental performances are framed by panoramic recordings of New York City and the Odyssey Cave, along with other on-location audio from his global travels, defining an expansive music that takes on hyperreal forms difficult to describe outside of the loss and wonderment that defines our age.
Keszler has released music on Shelter Press, Empty Editions, ESP Disk and PAN. His 2018 album Stadium was awarded Boomkat's Album Of The Year. Most recently, Keszler wrote the original score to
Dasha Nekrasova's feature The Scary of Sixty First (which made its recent premiere at Berlin Film Festival) and contributed to
Daniel Lopatin's original score for Josh and Benny Safdie's Uncut Gems. Keszler's music, installation, and visual work have appeared at the Whitney Museum, Lincoln Center, MIT List Center,
Victoria & Albert Museum, Sculpture Center, The Kitchen, South London Gallery, Hessel Museum, Harvard's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Luma-Foundation, Barbican, Walker Art Center, and MoMA PS1.
"Icons coheres into something strangely wonderful." - PITCHFORK
"gelatinous, haunted jazz" - FADER
"There are times in which Icons feels very much as if Keszler is providing a guided tour through an abandoned landscape, but he captures it in its most flattering light—it's not a dead city, but rather one undergoing a period of hibernation and renewal." - TREBLE
ICONS+ TRACKLIST:
All the Mornings in the World
God Over Money
The Accident
Daily Life
Rot Summer Smoothes
Dawn
Static Doesn't Exist
Late Archaic
Civil Sunset
Evenfall
We sang a dirge, and you did not mourn
Years Of This
Sunrise
