William Bowers
Post Modern












details

CATALOGUE relic 001
FORMAT compact disc
EDITION 1st run of 100 copies
SOUNDS minimalist electronic cityscapes
LENGTH 0:33:13
RELEASED monday | 5.30.11
PACKAGING professionally duplicated CDs, greyscale face
black matte 4-panel Digipaks
artwork by D.S. Ciarán


From his inception to the world of experimental sounds,

Green Bay, Wisconsin's William Bowers has always been a fickle friend to both the buzzing soliloquies of mechanised Noise and the soothing throw-back remnants of modernised electronica and pop. Even with his initial project, Christgau's Last Stand, a raucous, relentlessly harsh and almost punk-based outfit formed for no other reason than to expel a few aural daemons, I could always hear the want and need to grasp the hand of melody and structure, and break a few bones in the process.

CLS put down its gloves and donned the appropriate cap to graduate into the more temperamental world of Narshe, a project dedicated to midnight black-tar whispers and the excretion of unholy, droning passages, both of sound and time. While certainly much less abstract and wayward, the Narshe moniker simply did not fit the needs of an ever-evolving artist, and Bowers shed the skin in early 2011, deciding that his sounds needed nothing more than his birthright.

Now, with Post Modern, he has dropped all pretenses, peeling away the distracting surrounding elements of his sound to reveal one of the purest minimalistic electronic records we've had the pleasure of experiencing in quite some time. Whereas a large handful of synth-based electronic artists these days focus on creating the most complex, lush soundscapes and arpeggiated dancehall dreamstates they can muster, Post Modern allows Bowers to explore the distended Utopia of subway chants and skyscraper scrawls, tasting the muck beneath each rail and plucking every pearly white away from this imagined city's last dying grin. Picking the brains of (but never attempting to emulate) motherboard martyrs such as Aphex Twin, Nobuo Uematsu, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, this sublime collection of sounds ranges from pure static manipulated into pulsating sines of ethereal rhythms to resonating walls of homegrown ambiance.

Call it dream trance; call it techno-illogical. Call it anything you'd like; if you're ever feeling nostalgic for a crisp city night, route these sounds through the nearest pair of headphones and take a long trip down any given dirt path. You'll find what you're looking for.


IN THE PRESS

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