Liverpudlian producer Andrew PM Hunt announces Atlas of Green (RVNG Intl – September 20, 2024), his fifth album from his ongoing Dialect project. His last album in the series, Under~Between (2021), was a largely collaborative album borne out of his time as composer in residence for The Immix Ensemble. Alongside the ensemble and others from Liverpool’s improvisational music scene, Under~Between also used electronics to create synthetic acoustic ambiguities, fluid lines far removed from structural rigidity.
Atlas of Green embraces chance encounters within the malfunctions of physical media and glitching gear, and the ‘Green’ in the album’s title refers to the album’s protagonist – a young musician working in a future dawning era where lost signals and enduring impulses are unearthed from the sediments of technology and time.
The image of Green as a journeying adolescent in-between eras developed out of a burgeoning interest in the fantasy writing of Ursula K. Le Guin and Gene Wolfe and occurred at a point in Hunt’s life when the question of starting a family was looming. Green became a device for thinking about the future, or futures, putting someone in another world and granting access to a slightly longer timeframe than one’s own life. A thread of hope and compassion seems to connect everything.
In one of Maria Popova’s many insightful articles on The Marginalian, she spoke in some depth about Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Dispossessed’ and the connection between morality, time and effect, quoting from Shvek, the mathematician that Ursula K. Le Guin modelled on the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer:
If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly.
While Ursula K. Le Guin and Gene Wolfe may seem to lie at opposite ends of the political spectrum, they were both friends, she calling him “our Melville”. A New Yorker article on Wolfe concludes that what Wolfe most wanted his readers to know was that “compassion can withstand the most brutal of futures and exist on the most distant planets, and it has been part of us since ages long past.” In Hunt’s protagonist, shimmers of hope and compassion also present themselves:
“I imagined them doing what we’ve always done with music – using it to build a map of feeling, providing boundaries and tracing the edges of our emotions, defining a space of possibility and giving voice to our intuition. This is an alternative future to the one of endless growth but one which still holds space for hopes and dreams.”
He adds:
“As a planet of people we have to deal one way or another with our finite existence. We have to deal with that loss with hope still in our hearts – our capacity to love cannot be contingent on things lasting forever, and so this image of Green is not a vision of dystopia, nor utopia but an expression of trust and an acceptance of limits.”
For the album’s lead single, Late Fragment, Hunt has once again called upon US-based digital artist Sara Ludy:
For the video, Sara mined the internet for free webcam footage from around the world and mid-00s Flickr detritus in order to produce a series of images, which she then fed into an AI app. Without any accompanying text prompts, the software was free to interpret and hallucinate entirely new video sequences from these images, recontextualizing everyday fragments into something quite radical.
The song encompasses the melancholic core of the album, a patchwork of memory and mistranslation.
Dialect’s Atlas of Green will be released on vinyl, Japanese import CD, and digital editions on September 20, 2024.
Live Dates
09/19/2024 – London, UK @ Cafe OTO w/ Dylan Henner
Pre-Order Atlas of Green: https://lnk.to/rvngnl111