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Amph – ‘Polar/Mongol’ LP €17.5(EU)/€18.5(World)
Having defended the art of the press release in Matthias Andersson’s Fördämning zine (#1), it’s unfortunately been laid upon me to describe an album of my own, making it decidedly harder to come up with the kind of witty, meta-reflective noise scene commentaries I usually resort to. Left to offer then is some thoughts on the development of Amph up to this point. The band, consisting of myself and Andreas Malm (Skeppet, Body Awareness, Kosmisk Väg label) started operating in 2010. Having tried to make music together but not really found a common ground, we stumbled upon an LP by Messages on De Stijl. A path seemed to open. On this great release, Tres Warren, Taketo Shimada and Spencer Herbst successfully capture the spirit of 60s/70s New York minimalism within a distinctly contemporary musical framework. While initially aiming for something similar, we didn’t really sound like Messages in the end – more like Metgumbnerbone… What we borrowed is perhaps the unhurried pace and dedication to repetition, most prominently concretized in the use and abuse of the tape loop. Since the resulting debut, Rapport om blinda, a few more editions and compilation tracks has appeared on labels like Järtecknet, Untergeschoss, Hästen & Korset and Release the Bats. While the sound from the very beginning has been based around different repetitious structures, we’ve tried to push ourselves in new directions – whether we’ve wanted or not moving beyond the primitivistic appeal of the earlier tracks. The two cuts presented here are not necessarily less crude – the foundational elements are still hissy, slowed down four-track tapes – but it’s a crudeness approached, at least in part, with a greater compositional sensitivity. It’s hard to point to any one defining influence that’s paved the way for Polar / Mongol, but in different ways Amph’s current aesthetic points to everything from the on-going INA-GRM reissue campaign to Yoshi Wada, Raymond Dijkstra, Foxy Music, La Düsseldorf, the Potlatch label, Ashley C’s Timeless Reality, Graham Lambkin, Thurnemans, Wandelweiser, Regim, Dilloway, Choi Joonyong and Keith Rowe. In my opinion, this latest synthesis provides one of the more successfully realized examples of what we’ve tried to accomplish since the start of our collaboration. Edition of 250.

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