Fosil Sangiran

Pasar Fosil is classic Fosil Sangiran (Matt Shoemaker). At the core to this album is an ur-drone sculpted from electro-acoustics, analog synthesis, and most probably a radically altered field recording here or there. All of these accretions of sustained tone organize themselves with a rhizomatic logic of recombinant twists, folds, and mutations. Elegant harmonics with golden, clarion hues set the stage to this album, but Shoemaker would never allow for any his compositions to merely stand as polite ambient music. No. He deftly introduces sheared metallic timbres and rasping dissonance that tug with a gravitational heft. By the second half of the album, Shoemaker plunges into aural thickets that are openly hostile to the listener, articulated through allusions to a humid claustrophobia and radioactive toxicity. Even compared to the muscular minimalism of Organum, Pasar Fosil is unsettling as it is exquisite.