New Zealand's seht (AKA Stephen Clover) has spawned a musical monster around one consistent idea: that simplicity can be the most mind-expanding drug around. Over the course of a dozen releases on labels like Last Visible Dog and Celebrate Psi-Phenomenon, Clover has perfected this artform. Using a minimal array of instruments and effects, he sculpts every sound source he can find into soothing walls of aural bliss. Doing more with less is rarely done better than this.
"The Green Morning" is seht's third proper CD release, and comes on the heels of a series of limited CD-Rs. Through his ability to synthesize a seemingly endless array of sounds into a single, focused point, seht acts as a modern composer in the same vein as William Basinski. Clover's drones have explored various territory through the past few years, everything from glacial ambience to desconstructed blues. "The Green Morning" is like the early moments of dawn, bathed in warm plumes of sonic sunlight. These songs are the memories trapped beneath the floorboards, and by looking back Clover offers a mere glimpse into the ambience of a not-so-distant future.
track list:
1. valles marineris
2. olympus mons
3. way in the middle of the air
4. cydonia (audio sample)
5. chryse planitia
Press for seht:
"There is a certain set of music that I listen to when falling asleep. With ease, I'm adding this record to that collection. Dreams were made for this release." - Tom Sekowski, GazEta
"Another classic slab of dark dreamy drone from Stephen Clover aka Seht. The title definitely hints at what you'll find on this here disc: a slow moving glacial drone, icy and crystalline, throbbing and reverberating, shifting and swirling, barely there but somehow totally and gorgeously suffocating. Lush layers of sound, piled atop one another, as we watch each layer slowly merge with the one beneath it, sonic tendrils surreptitiously exploring the layers around it, until all the layers are inexorably linked, a slowly squirming intertangled mass, dreamy and hypnotic, but haunting and foreboding as well. The second track threw us for a loop though, when a seemingly out of place shuffling drum beat kicked in, all dubbed out and effected, which at first seemed totally distracting, but quickly drew us in with its propulsive throb, and the whole thing quickly becomes some sort of gorgeously alien krautrock. Really cool." - Aquarius Records
"Seht's greatest strength is in making his tunes thoroughly listenable, no matter how avant-garde his subject matter." - Ethan Covey, Sup is a Magazine