** Edition of 200, paired with a hand numbered insert ** No One Notices the Fly finds Zander Raymond at a quietly pivotal moment in his practice, extending a years-long investigation into listening as both craft and ethic. After roughly a dozen releases across the last half decade, this new album sounds less like a stylistic pivot than a sharpening of focus. The premise is disarmingly simple: treat everything - a bowed mistake, an HVAC cough, a cable thump, a half-formed loop - as potential material, and then see what kinds of songs emerge if you resist the urge to clean them up. Across fourteen concise tracks, Raymond shapes this raw matter into pieces that hover between composition and happenstance, as if the record were continually catching itself in the act of becoming.

The opening track, “just keep going”, lays out the stakes with almost disarming candour: a short, reaching phrase on an out-of-tune violin, tentatively bowed, a little “wrong” by conservatory standards yet freighted with unforced feeling. It plays like a found practice tape and a thesis statement at once. Throughout the album, this trust in imperfect gestures recurs. Raymond’s techniques - live sampling, rapid resampling, on-the-fly filtering and a kind of gestural editing carried out in real time - allow one sound to refract into many. A scrape becomes a chord; a clipped breath becomes a pulse; a stray resonance turns into a pad that quietly anchors the entire piece. Occasional appearances by long-time collaborators Lia Kohl and Matt Sage fold additional layers of instrumental and textural nuance into the mix, but always in the service of this provisional, attentive atmosphere rather than as “features” in the showy sense.

What might read on paper as an album about debris turns out to be unexpectedly opulent in the ear. Each track feels like a tiny vitrine, filled with what other artists might have discarded: rustling contact mics, room hum, snippets of melody that trail off before they become themes. The comparison to Yuji Agematsu’s daily collections of “desirable street debris” is apt: like Agematsu’s cigarette-pack sculptures, these pieces are meticulous without being precious, ornate yet grounded in the most ordinary of inputs. Raymond seems most interested in the moment when a sound crosses the threshold from “background” to “foreground” - when the hiss in a recording suddenly becomes the thing you’re listening for, or when the rhythm of footsteps overtakes the nominal “track” they were meant to accompany. The micro steadily enlarges until it becomes the frame.

Formally, the album balances instability and coherence with a light touch. Many pieces begin in what feels like stable terrain - a pulse, a loop, a droning chord - only to be nudged off-axis by small intrusions: a new texture arriving half a beat late, a filter that tilts the whole spectrum, a cut that leaves a tiny, telling gap. Sometimes a new pattern emerges, sometimes the structure simply frays and the track evaporates. This willingness to let things remain unresolved is one of the record’s quiet achievements; rather than forcing his materials into neat arcs, Raymond allows entropy to remain audible. The music doesn’t simply document decay, though; it listens to the little reorganisations that happen within it, the ways a system in flux briefly arranges itself into something like a song.