The UK-based ambient musician Dylan Henner is readying his “Amtracks” EP for release on September 24th via the Phantom Limb sub-label Spirituals. While the artist often works from field recordings gathered while performing his day job as a photographer’s assistant, quarantine made it challenging to work in that manner. So instead, “Amtracks” is a memory piece inspired by a journey aboard Amtrak’s Pennsylvanian train service. While the five tracks comprising the EP, each named for a stop along the way, were inspired by Henner’s trip across the state in his twenties, that journey itself was a retracing of a trip the musicians’ father had taken year’s before. Adding a third layer of memory to the project, he reminds us:
“Humans have been traversing this route for millenia. The indigenous peoples of North America, including the Seneca and the Leni Lenape, had established the route long before Europeans did. A journey like this is a fascinating reminder of how tiny we are; of how huge and real nature is and how little it changes even when generations of mankind pass through it.”
Sam C directs the video for “Exton,” the EP’s lead single. Here, memory is explored using two vantages of found travel footage. The director explains:
“The video transforms found footage into two unique visual perspectives on the same train journey. Each perspective uses a machine learning algorithm to stylize the original footage, in a similar way that a person’s memories and experiences inflect their daily life. I imagine the two perspectives as two passengers on the same train, their experiences overlap as they have a chance encounter before going their separate ways.“
