Music News: Waxy Tomb to Release ‘Imminent Fold’ LP Via Gilgongo Records

Waxy Tomb is readying the release of their Imminent Fold LP and art book on September 1st via Gilgongo Records. The work of Bay-area multi-disciplinary artist and educator Jules Litman-Cleper, the project has been active since 2011. While we last heard from Waxy Tomb with the digital release of GripDrip on the French experimental label Tsuku Boshi, Imminent Fold is the artist’s first vinyl effort.

Litman-Cleper’s work deals with the interaction between digital and natural worlds and often seems a means for exploring deeper issues related to cognition, identity, and transformation. Through the practices of sculpture, installation, multi-media performance, image-making, and interactive design, the artist queries the often tenuous gap between our understanding of the “synthetic” and “real” as a means for deconstructing our other accepted binaries of identity.

On Imminent Fold, Waxy Tomb continues these interests with a multi-media “field report” dealing with how synthetic reality and digital processes affect our underlying sense of organic structure. From an audio perspective, it is as though Litman-Cleper imagines electronic music’s gridded and looped sonic approach as a metaphor for the natural world’s perceived geometric structure. Against these more stable forms, the artist collides glitched and seemingly random synthetic textures as a means for subverting the grip time signature has on keeping music an ordered reality.

While chaos and structure battle in this back and forth across Imminent Fold‘s eighteen tracks, creating bizarre new forms along the way, Litman-Cleper’s shadowy vocals seem to offer some opaque warning in this hall of warping mirrors. Curiously strident and almost desperately voluble, the artist attempts to tell us something, though each voicing comes out mysteriously garbled as it travels across the hazy transom we attempt to erect between our organic and synthetic worlds.

Waxy Tomb’s Imminent Fold LP is due out September 1st via Gilgongo Records.