Articles and Reviews

Article from Boomkat

I Love You, Please Love Me Too

After the Keith Fullerton Whitman album nabbed our album of the year spot just a couple of weeks back, here's another breathtaking and brain-baking album from the incredible PAN imprint. Featuring concrete/tape music psychedelia from LAMFS member, Joseph Hammer, the album is presented in stunning style by the label and once again has made us scratch our heads at the aesthetic and expansive vision of this exhilarating crew. Since 1980 Hammer has operated in a plethora of under-the-radar units such as Dinosaurs With Horns, Joe & Joe, and Points of Friction, but 'I Love You, Please Love Me Too' is about the best entry portal to his multi-dimensional world. With a plunderphonic, Cagean appreciation for the infinite textures of AM radio and "mid century sci fi" Joseph weaves arrestingly hypnotic and experimental 3D collages which have utterly commanded our attention. One precedent for this unorthodox LP immediately springs to mind in the arrhythmic exercises of Nicholas Collins' 'Devil's Music', but Hammer's heightened spatial awareness and almost arabesque feel for patterning makes this album less academic, placing it in an elusive realm of mind-altering abstraction. The systolic stream of looped samples bends time and space with a vividly visual and enveloping intimacy, wrapping listeners in an improvised vortex of acousmatic teases and reference points which seem to fold into an inert aural blind spot point just out of view behind the ears. At times this LP feels like an opiated Dilla jamming with James Ferraro at Pierre Henry's in-house installation, and at others it's like The Caretaker just discovered mescaline, but either way this is one incredible record. All copies come in pro-press jacket, itself housed in two-tone silk-screened PVC sleeve (just like everything else on this amazing label), in a limited run of 330 hand-numbered, 140gm vinyl copies, artwork designed by Kathryn Politis and Bill Kouligas, and sounds mastered by D&M's Rashad Becker. WOW!!!