Oliver Coates – “Throb, Shiver, Arrow of Time” (Released 25th October 2024)

Description

//Rvng. Intl//

£24.99 – 1xLP

The British cellist, composer and producer offers a capsule of personal resonance and remembrance, assembled over the past six years.

While working on ‘Aftersun’, Wells asked Coates how music could signal that someone is going on a trawl through their memory — a question that has stayed with him ever since and fosters a heartbeat running through the record.

‘Throb, shiver, arrow of time’ is “all about inaccurate transmissions from our memories, overlaid with emotions from other sources,” says Coates. The release is imbued with the ache and glow of recollections mulched together, where the guttural dissonance of misremembering is shrouded by strange orbs of sentiment.

At the record’s inner core is “Shopping centre curfew,” a swift yet cavernous track that emerged five years ago when two real world events, both occurring in South London during the pandemic lockdowns, became fused in a dream: the demolition of Elephant and Castle shopping center, and the discussion of a curfew as a real possibility for all men following a violent crime. A strange simultaneity occurred with this piece of music and Coates built the album out from there, a sense of temporal entropy refracting shimmers of lurking convulsions into lucid sonic topologies.

The ten compositions of ‘Throb, shiver, arrow of time’ find weightless melodies soaring across after-image gradients, magnified and compressed. Misted tones within “Please be normal” and “90” soften drone-soaked shudders of inner acoustics messing up. Vocal invocations appear from long-term collaborators Malibu and chrysanthemum bear, as well as drifting synth radiance from Faten Kanaan. ‘Throb, shiver, arrow of time’ furthers Coates’ reach in collapsing the digital into the analogue and vice versa, allowing serendipity to reorganize the material and push out against the confines of flatness.

This sculptural approach to sound is deeply influenced by the intricate installations of artist Sarah Sze, whose permutations of visual matter with its own after-image form kaleidoscopic epitaphs for ephemera and emotion. Coates’ thinking about Sze’s work and processes flowed together with his own playing and editing techniques, superimposing the textural relief of a live take back into a composition, and allowing the sound to succumb to a dream of itself.

Tracklisting:

1. Ultra valid
2. Radiocello
3. Please be normal
4. Apparition (feat. Malibu)
5. Address
6. Backprint Radiation (feat. Faten Kanaan)
7. Shopping centre curfew
8. 90
9. Living branches (feat. chrysanthemum bear)
10. Make it happen