bas relief: new music dispatch

greetings bas relief listeners far and wide. we have many an update for you, including news of our first album in six years; a beautiful piece by graphic artist and old friend robert voyvodic; an upcoming show; and other items.

what if the ground was itself nebulous?

yup, that’s what we’re calling this one. eight tracks, mostly written from 2022-2024, with a lone exception from 2017 in the mix. this one marks our first album-length release since 2018’s QTT8!

i’ve been rattling phrases around in my head, trying to decode the clearest means of describing the music and styles within, which is something i thought would get easier over time, but hasn’t really! if you’re receiving this email though, you have some idea of what to expect, so i’ll spare you the explanations and expectations.

listen on:

• bandcamp

• spotify

• apple music

• or have a free download

as you see, we’ve provided the album on all the usual streaming platforms, but as is usual of bas relief, we encourage a slower experience. listen wherever you please—but know that a fuller experience awaits you beyond the walls of streaming.

montrealers, please take note‼ we’ll be performing the album in full on november 9, opening for ratboys and ducks ltd. buy tickets if you’d like to see that!

art and layout by robert voyvodic

for this release we commissioned our longtime friend robert voyvodic to design what i’ve been referring to as the Real Artwork, from which the traditional square album cover was derived.

i wanted to use the full version—the “macro” as we call it—specifically as something to share privately, or with purchase, or some other form of engagement with the album that occurs outside walled garden social media platforms, whose restrictive and extractive means are at their core comprised of every last antithesis to a better future.

in order to push against this corporate consolidation-extraction loop, i have worked hard to own my work, maintain a comprehensive archive (much of it available on our website), start a blog essentially for the sole purpose of sharing in-progress music, and even keep this small mailing list in tact over the years. all so that when these platforms eventually fail, or collapse in on themselves due to the AI slop ouroboros they created, they won’t take our—and by extension robert’s—work with them, and we won’t have invested ourselves in something that would never give back even a fraction of what we put into it.

in this way, what we do feels more personal, and i really wanted that to extend to robert’s work, for him to produce something beyond the confines of your traditional square album artwork. and i don’t even really have a problem with square covers, i actually think it’s cool that it’s this unifying piece of music in a way. but context is so important to me, lol, so there had to be something more than the square. obviously!!! and what robert made totally exceeded my expectations. i think it’s so fucking sick. have a look:

secret webpage

as an extension of all the aforementioned, i made a “secret” page on our website, where i speak a lot more openly to the moment in which this music was produced. like the artwork above, i won’t be sharing this website on social media. but i am making it known via this mailing list. on this page you’ll also find free downloads for everything associated with this project, including stems, the highest res version of the above poster, and multiple audio formats of the album. i could reproduce parts of the page here, but i’m trying to keep the more substantive parts of our work off-platform as much as possible.

we had to move the newsletter

if such things matter to you, tinyletter was killed earlier this year by intuit/mailchimp and an evershifting landscape, so we’ve moved to beehiiv. i know next to nothing about this platform, and for all i know they’re using all these words and images to train some model or whatever. so, this will in all likelihood remain a very sporadically updated newsletter, mostly to keep you apprised of our new releases, as the utility of social media wanes further.

thanks for listening and reading!

[email protected]