Holland Andrews - Wordless / Forgettings

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Vinyl LP pressing. Frequently highlighting themes surrounding vulnerability and healing, American composer and performer Holland Andrews arranges music for voice, clarinet, and electronics. As a vocalist, their influences stem from a dynamic range including contemporary opera, theater, and jazz, while cultivating their own unique vocal style, integrating these influences with language disintegration and vocal distortion. Andrews' Wordless EP was first released in February 2021. Forgettings is the second in a series of four EPs. It is an instinctive follow-up to Wordless which shares many of it's predecessor's characteristics while remaining admirably difficult to define. As likely to draw upon electronic as organic sources - like Andrew's remarkably adaptable voice and their training as a clarinetist - it opens with the blissful, ecstatic 'Transform Forever', wreathing layers of harmonies around crystalline synth patterns, while the title track scavenges one of 'Transform Forever's vocal refrains upon which it patiently builds a celestial, ultimately cathartic soundscape. 'Green's profoundly meditative use of field recordings, sublime drones, muffled voices and soothing synths is meanwhile almost spiritual, and the quasi-ambient 'Far Place', on which Andrews worked with Son Lux's Ryan Lott, leaves piano notes orbiting space.