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Vloed

by Masker

supported by
pakpakpakpak
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pakpakpakpak A thorough exploration of a very interesting subject, keep it up! Favorite track: Flood.
Taras Shpot
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setitonfire
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martijn_nijenhuis
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smartbits
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chil3247
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mediamonarchy
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Futilist
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Jumper Romperoom
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JakeBS
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  • Full Digital Discography

    5
    releases

    Get all 5 Masker releases available on Bandcamp and save 35%.

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Rub, The Triptych Remix, The Underground City, Vloed, and Wizards of Mars. , and , .

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1.
Wind 05:41
2.
Wave 03:50
3.
Breach 03:08
4.
Flood 11:53
5.
Quiet 04:54

about

"They abandoned their hopeless struggle, turned their backs on the sea, and whenever their declining means allowed it, built to the westward in a protracted flight that went on for generations; The slowly dying town followed - by reflex, one might say - one of the fundamental patterns of human behavior."
- W.G. Sebald, on the fate of Dunwich after the great floods of 1287


The flood of St. Lucia's Day in 1287, one of the handful around this time that precipitated the fall of Dunwich, also swept through modern-day Holland. Fifty to Eighty thousand people were killed and the geography of the land altered so considerably it turned the small, freshwater fishing village of Amsterdam into an incipient seaport. By way of disaster this town would eventually become the richest in the world and command outsized influence in matters of religion, commerce, culture, and empire.
Six hundred and sixty six years later, a similar storm brewed in the North Sea, once again bearing down on Holland. Two thousand people in the southern province of Zeeland perished on the night of January 31, 1953.
The Dutch took a different tack than Dunwich. They engineered a forty year building project to protect their below sea-level coastline for ten thousand years. By the time they completed construction, climate change laid bare the reality they faced: this elaborate system would have to be continuously buttressed and fortified in defiance of rising sea levels.


VLOED was built on a rigid set of rules. It was initially conceived as an experiment in percussive polyrhythms, without any beat of four that sustains the common pulse of western music. All tonality was to be mined out of found sound and samples. The foundation of this idea remains, though along the way the structure buckled and the production washed with instrumentation. The result is a certain unfamiliarity not dissimilar to laying eyes on an altered landscape. The brain struggles to fuse what it's used to seeing against what is being presented.
Husc and Shark take this sonic concept of a storm all the way to breach, whereupon Simon Lemay finds himself struggling to find solid ground on "Flood". By dint of his tremendous drum skills, he manages to keep the twelve minute free-form track afloat with almost no musical context to rely on.
Once the water recedes, we're left with the silence. A common theme of post-flooding scenarios is a lack of birdsong, or of any animal activity. Futilist adds a layer of menace to this metaphor on "Quiet", evoking the contemporary rhythms of rapid media cycles and slow institutional responses.

VLOED dwells on catastrophe, but it's not a clarion call.
We're not set up for that.
We only pose that multiple protracted disasters occurring simultaneously has a much wider proximity than the floods of old.
We're not set up for this.
What we have is the history of so many waves to inform us of those to come.

credits

released October 1, 2020

Husc - Guitar, synthesizers, percussion
Shark - Bass, samples, synthesizers, percussion
Simon Lemay - Drums on "Flood"
Futilist - Additional sampling on "The Quiet"
Cover photo by Vincent Legault

With special thanks to James "Jimmy James" Baran and Gart Darley

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Masker Montreal, Québec

Masker is an Electroacoustic collective based in Montreal. With one foot in the academic worlds of 20th-century compositional approaches and the other in the iconoclastic forms of Punk Rock, Metal, and Jazz, they attempt to fold these disciplines into larger conceptual themes. ... more

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