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Streaming + Download
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Purchasable with gift card
$9USD or more
Cassette + Digital Album
Foundscapes is the photography project of Brooklyn-based musician and composer, Jeremy Gustin. His first book, also titled Foundscapes, features shots taken all over the globe, from New York to Bombay. Gustin has an eye for images that can be found all around us, but often remain unnoticed.
Includes unlimited streaming of Mere Husk
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Jeremy Gustin is a one-of-a-kind drummer who has toured and recorded with Rubblebucket, Okkervil River, David Byrne, Marc Ribot, Delicate Steve, and Albert Hammond Jr.. He has long been in demand for his ability to bring a touch of the unorthodox to highly structured and improvised musical settings alike, so it should come as no surprise that on his own solo project, The Ah, Gustin explores the outer boundaries of his imagination to the fullest.
The Ah's new album Mere Husk, the follow-up to 2017’s Common Bliss, sees Gustin once again crafting animal noises, water sounds, miscellaneous found audio, and his own playing into a harmonic language that straddles the line between his love of pop songcraft and his equally strong attraction to the abstract. Rather than employ gurgling fish tank bubbles and dolphin calls for their ambient properties alone, for example, Gustin bends them beyond recognition so that they mimic synths or serve the role of instrumental parts in an arrangement that falls together like a classic "song" --- whether Gustin includes vocals or not. "I love songs and melody," says Gustin. "As much as I like unusual stuff, I'm a song guy at heart."
Gustin's longtime passion for photography gives us a window into The Ah's animated sonic universe. Whether he is out touring or just walking home from the grocery store, his eye is constantly drawn to the interplay of color, texture, and shape calling out to him from surfaces the rest of us might pass by without so much as a glance. A typical Gustin photograph captures what he refers to as “Foundscapes”: for example, multiple layers of posters on a Tribeca wall stripped and frayed to form an unintended collage; chipping paint rendered in such three-dimensional detail that it seems to invite your fingers to run across its contours; delicate veins of copper rust slowly eroding on a dented expanse of bright blue.
In several respects, The Ah is Gustin's musical answer to his visual Foundscapes. "When I'm writing music," he explains, "I look at it as something akin to archeology. It's not like 'This specific thing happened to me so I want the music to sound a specific way.' It's more like I'm chiseling away until a shape emerges and it starts to seem like music. In a way, I let the music create itself. I don't even see it as I'm creating so much as I'm just finding things. These materials are all around us all the time."
As intuitive as Gustin's process may be, Mere Husk expands dramatically on the vision introduced with Common Bliss. Though twirling from playful to solemn and back again, Gustin's music is as easy to take in as watching the myriad shades of colorful marine life swimming through an aquarium.
Mere Husk will be released January 31 on NNA Tapes.
credits
released January 31, 2020
All songs written, performed, and recorded at The Loom by Jeremy Gustin
Except all drum set recorded by Ian Hersey at Carefree Studios
This record has such a magical flow to it, it seems to capture so directly the ups and downs of life, the joy of music and dance, and it's just so damn catchy and fun to listen to as well. Giles
The enigmatic Frank Ene's solo record lives in a magical world where Serge Gainsbourg fronts Yellow Magic Orchestra. Bandcamp New & Notable Nov 17, 2022
An audiovisual album by Australian avant-garde artist Harriet Robertson, aka Main Dice, inspired by Russian literature. Bandcamp New & Notable Aug 31, 2021
One of the most spiritually connected albums I've ever heard. There is something mystic and divine about this that's hard to place. A show I'd consider top 10 places to turn a time travel dial back to! 🕛 Nate Stevens