emptyset have shared the new single “Penumbra” taken from their upcoming album Dissever, out May 23rd. Coming just after their first US show in over 5 years at Long Play Festival in New York, the track evolves from a simple oscillation, the tones growing in volume and density as the piece progresses. “Penumbra” emanates with slow deliberate pulses that expand and contract, like slinking otherworldly coils of sparks that bristle outwards in syncopated rhythms.
emptyset’s new album builds on their ongoing exploration into the histories of electronic sound and media across the 20th century, considering the intertwined evolution of cosmic rock, minimalism and electronic music, viewed through their prospective dreams and overlapping technological ambitions. The compositions across Dissever draw threads from these pioneering production methods emerging in parallel across the late 1960’s, considering the cross talk between these fields and their radical intentions to carve out the future from differing paths, traversing the mystical and modern, while incorporating elements of the transformative, hypnotic, expansive and transcendent to define new principles within sound.
The arrangements, performed live and captured in single takes, emerged across a series of sessions at long term collaborator Mat Sampson’s recording studio in Bristol. This process revisited early hardware, spatial and multitrack recording techniques to create a dynamic body of material that could look back to these foundational musical forms and converge them through the lens of a reimagined timeline, cultivating a transmission from 1969 to the present and a sensory bridge to the past.
Dissever was first presented at Tate Modern as a live performance to accompany the exhibition Electric Dreams, a large-scale survey of the global history of art and technology, which built further on the improvisatory nature of the compositions and their evolving performative possibilities. The ideas and methods of the album were equally anchored through the duo’s parallel explorations, notably within Ginzburg’s work with the transnational multi-instrumental group Osmium, and Purgas’ research and installations uncovering the sonic histories of South Asia.
