Black To Comm Announces New Album 'Before After'

Close on the heels of his acclaimed Thrill Jockey debut Seven Horses for Seven Kings, chameleonic composer Black To Comm has announced the album's follow-up and companion piece Before After. The album will be released as a limited-edition 12" on opalescent white vinyl July 12th. Alongside the announcement Black To Comm shares new single "Eden-Olympia", a dense, undulating electronic piece that takes its title from J.G. Ballard's Super-Cannes. Black To Comm will be touring Europe this July with The Body in support of the release.

Black To Comm is the solo project of German producer and sound artist Marc Richter. Through his mastery of sonic manipulation, Richter collapses the past, present and future of recorded music into kaleidoscopic pieces that transcend time and genre, brilstling with detail and emotion. Richter's technical approach to making music is deeply informed in his philosophy of time. He points to a quote from early electronic pioneer Eliane Radigue as a key inspiration: "everything is an interval, we are always in-between. And in this interval, between two states, there is a continual expression of invisible variations, imperceptible transitions." Before After exists in that fluid, liminal space, drawing on sounds and influences from disparate pasts and using these to synthesise new futures.

Before After was written during the same sessions that gave birth to Richter's recent magnum opus Seven Horses For Seven Kings and intended as its companion piece, mining similar raw sonic materials to yield radically different results. Where Seven Horses was a visceral work focused on anger and desperation, Before After finds faint glimmers of hope in the same sources. It charts a hallucinogenic journey through polar extremes of emotion and to the outer reaches of sound, perfectly completing the darker Seven Horses while vastly expanding on its vision.

Photo Credit: Pelle Buys

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