Liverpool experimentalist Dialect uses his love of geology to create organic ambient collages

FACT Rated is our series digging into the sounds and stories of the most vital breaking artists around right now. This week Adam Badí Donoval speaks to Liverpool producer Dialect who textural album Loose Blooms was released earlier this year on Forest Swords’ label, Dense Truth.

NAME: DIALECT
FROM: LIVERPOOL, UNITED KINGDOM
MUST-HEAR: LOOSE BLOOMS (DENSE TRUTH)
FOR FANS OF: TIM HECKER, BEN FROST, FIS

Liverpool producer Andrew PM Hunt, aka Dialect, has a hard time talking about his latest album Loose Blooms. “There’s a lot of ideas going on at the same time,” he says. “They’re all kind of related to a sense of never-ending movement in the world.” The album is inspired by geology and the concept of audio recycling, as well as the radical sonic differences between Liverpool’s nightclub district, where Hunt resides, and the big wide natural spaces he visited while living in the USA.

There is, indeed, a lot of movement in the sounds on Loose Blooms, which was released earlier this year on Forest Swords’s label, Dense Truth. One sound fading out simply creates space for another one to rise up; a never-ending transfer of energy and constant mutation was integral to Hunt’s vision. He is obsessed with energy and movement, “whether it be on a tiny level of bugs eating up some carcass somewhere or at a massive level of the rocks of the Earth constantly shifting and morphing.”

One of Hunt’s more esoteric influences is thinking of sound like one would think of strata in rocks. “I like this idea of flattening these layers of sound, compressing them until they transform into something else,” he says. “There’s this iridescent, inadvertent psychedelia to them, even though they’re scientific images.” The cover of Loose Blooms, which was designed by Forest Swords, is centered around geological diagrams called interferograms which show the movement of land over time.

The opening ‘Dawn Simulator’ layers dogs howling, crickets chirps and grainy synths to hypnotic effect, only to dissolve into album highlight ‘Fissures’, which is centered around gnarly synthesizers, cellos, cryptic voices and rhythmic exploration. Other highlights are the subtle and gritty ‘The Rain at the Right Time’, the poetic and atmospheric ‘Thirlmere Wash’, or the duet of closing tracks ‘One Day Our Phones Will Be Rocks’, which is as catchy as abstract electronic music can get, and the gentle, spacious ‘Crippled & Formless’.

At the core of the album are various different sound sources: programmed synthesizer systems, MIDI information generated by an in-browser picture-to-MIDI converter, field recordings from both American deserts and the street Hunt lives on in Liverpool, as well as some live instrumentation. All of the sounds are heavily processed though, so nothing is at is seems.

Looking ahead, things look quite busy for Hunt. He’s a touring member of Forest Swords’ band (he plays the saxophone), he’s collaborating and recording with various local musicians in Liverpool and starting the work on his next album which will concentrate on language. In addition to all that, he’s also aiming to take Loose Blooms on the road.

Working on the live Dialect show alongside his friend, co-worker and collaborator Jake Mascis (who also runs the Pale Master label), Hunt hopes to approach the live rendition of the album with extreme fluidity. He will man a degenerative synth setup, while Mascis will work with stems off the album recorded onto cassette tapes. It’s a testament to Hunt’s vision: reconfiguring the familiar into something completely new.

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