Curious Music is pleased to announce the release of the brilliant new album, Soft Light by Heavy Color. Soft Light is a recombination of 60’s spiritual jazz, meditations in pattern-based music, instrumental hip hop, and psychedelic pop.
Soft Light is available as a digital download and limited-edition cd. A 180-gram audiophile vinyl release date will be announced later.
Scott Boberg, Deputy Director of the Ann Arbor Film Festival writes about Soft Light.
“Just a few days ago I read J.G. Ballard’s short story The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista, part of a sequence of his tales set in a futuristic seaside artist enclave called Vermillion Sands, a place where orchids have been bred to sing arias, metal sound sculptures grow like plants, stingrays fly in the air, and poetry is produced by computer program. In The Thousand Dreams, homes are designed to physically reflect, in their malleable plastic walls, the mood of their owners and, being a work by Ballard, the story comes to a nihilistically-twisted conclusion. What if, however, that psychotropic home was designed by Heavy Color and the experience of listening became a joyous one that, while it doesn’t shy away from the negative, is a buoyantly affirmative journey to the positive?
I realized that for me their new album Soft Light is actually a ten-room house, and as I stepped into each carefully-crafted space, I was immediately immersed in that specific sonic experience in which I kept finding personal reference points that continue to exponentially accumulate with repeated listening (hold your breath before diving into my very personal (and, yes, partial) list of where this music took me): Nik Bärtsch, Harold Budd, Kate Bush, Can, The Comet is Coming, Cluster, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Eno (Brian and Roger), Peter Gabriel, John Hassell, Hüsker Dü, Kraftwerk, Pierre Kwenders, My Bloody Valentine, Bill Nelson, Pink Floyd, Prefuse 73, Ravel, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Stereolab, Tangerine Dream, Wilco, Wire, and Hector Zazou… Yikes!
Just like one of Ballard’s mood rooms, I suspect that each listener who steps into Soft Light will find their own network of reference points, a testament to the richness of experience that Heavy Color has invested in each and every room in this house. Go ahead, make yourself at home and stay awhile.”
Available For Purchase at Curious Music
Available for Streaming at Bandcamp and Spotify, Apple Music ETc.
Infinite Pyramids is the first single from the album Soft Light.
The video is a hypnotic journey through pattern and sound, inspired by the simplicity of early animation.
The song, inspired in part by a piece by Sol Lewitt, was originally composed as part of an installation and performance at the Toledo Museum of Art's Glass Pavilion. Infinite Pyramids is simple in its essence, but the shadows casted by the rudimentary layers being superimposed upon one another create a complex web of interconnected moving parts. The piece was premiered in front of a live audience, whom, along with the band, were encircled by 8x12 screens which played synchronized animations created for the composition. Some of the animations and concepts from that original performance are explored in this animated video by artist, Denys Zahorodnii.