(2022) Francis Harris - Thresholds
Review:
Francis Harris has covered a lot of ground in the more than two decades he’s spent in the electronic scene. He’s put out everything from tech house to ethereal experimental music as a key player behind projects including Adultnapper, Frank & Tony and Aris Kindt. Although Harris cut his teeth behind the decks, the work he’s dropped under his own name tends to be reserved and sophisticated — tracks for people who go to the party for the soundsystem instead of the bar. “I’m a studio nerd. I wanna make albums and record bands. I like to cook and listen to music and read books,” he told RA in 2014. With this in mind, it seems fitting that his latest album, Thresholds, tinkers with eerie, cottony ambient. The LP strips his sound to the bare minimum, straying from the rich, jazzy palette that defines his signature solo style. Thresholds is sometimes overcast and oblique, but it’s often charming and approachable. “Rebstock Fold” pairs ashy crackles with a bold instrumental palette that mirrors the work of neoclassical labels like Erased Tapes. “Cut Up” skitters along like a featherweight drum & bass track that never drops. “On That Occasion, Landeau” drenches an otherworldly female voice in a stuttering tremolo effect, which rides atop a backdrop of silvery chords. The closer, “Every Degree of Distance,” is the most poetic of the record’s tracks, thanks to a stoic guest feature from Eliana Glass. If older Harris cuts like “Lostfound” and “Plays I Play” were romantic torch songs, then this new material evokes the hazy ache of Grouper. The music on Thresholds originally came to life as a series of synth sketches composed for several Public Domain films that aired on Harris’s livestream channel, Public Records TV. He fleshed out these arrangements over the course of several months, calling on artists like Dave Harrington and Pan.American mastermind Mark Nelson to play on the album, coloring new shades of grey into Harris’s cryptic compositions. Yet, while some big names appear this record’s 12 tracks, Thresholds‘ sonics occasionally feel a bit thin. “Useless Machines” is centered on melancholic synthesizers and the dissonant thrum of an e-bow—you get the feeling it could have appeared on an ambient compilation 20 years ago as much as a new record in 2022. “New Pastoral” utilizes a pitter-pattering tom groove to lay the framework for unsettling piano flourishes and warbling atmospheric textures, though it never quite comes together. Thresholds is touted as Harris’s ambient album, but previous efforts like Minutes of Sleep put a somewhat prettier and more engaging spin on a similar approach.
Track List:
1.Useless Machines 04:14
2.And Everything Is One Thing After Another 03:10
3.Rebstock Fold 05:31
4.Earth Moves 07:13
5.Thresholds 05:05
6.Luck Takes A Step 05:01
7.I Can Still See Us 06:44
8.Speculative Nature Of Purposive Form 06:30
9.Cut Up 03:52
10.New Pastoral 06:11
11.On That Occasion, Landeau 05:49
12.Every Degree Of Distance 02:40
Media Report:
Genre: ambient
Country: USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Note: If you like the music, support the artist
