Premiere

Byron Westbrook
“Fractal Shift”

Byron Westbrook

We’ve been trying to write this post for the past 15 minutes but keep getting distracted by the ambient machinery that washes over Byron Westbrook’s new album. Now available through Root Strata, Precipice is sound art that’s set to stun—what happens when you stare at the sun for far too long and everything fades to black, white and grey. Here’s what the composer/producer had to say about the #selftitledpremiere above, followed by a full stream of the record and some fall tour dates:

“Fractal Shift” is an overlay of organized sound events which repeat in elastic variation without actually looping. Its loose rhythms and implied melodies are perpetually on the verge of lining up, creating different geometries and multiple perspectives of these sounds moving around each other in space. The video operates similarly, using clips of lo-fi analog video improvisation which feature shapes that appear as objects in space, implying figurative gestures or motions one might expect from bodies in dance.


Byron Westbrook tour dates:
10/28 Brooklyn, NY *
11/11 Los Angeles, CA – South of Sunset
11/12 San Francisco, CA – ATA #
11/14 Vancouver, BC – Quiet City
12/4 Montreal, QC – Ritz PDB
12/11 Chicago, IL – Experimental Sound Studios
12/12 Cleveland, OH – TBA
12/13 Toronto, ON – Ratio

* with Roe Enney, Tint
# collaboration with Paul Clipson

Further Reading