Amselysen - Hypnagogic Surge (2020)

"The album reveals an aggressive and intense character based on phonemic defects and highlights an excess of energy that possesses the listener's ear and imagination, in addition to its old and obscure samples devoid of nostalgia." (Ma3azef)

HYPNAGOGIC SURGE by AMSELYSEN is a dense setup of signal interferences, of jacked up, spliced, reconstructed digital snippets, of outbursts whose amplitude overcooks the microphone's defenseless circuitry. Anxious with unreleased energy build-ups, the music is always pregnant with a double quality, something like a dagger made from ice, the possibility to shatter or crumble into a thousand shards combined with the looming threat of clean rupture posed by the blade's edge. Digital distortion is used here to unmask materials, to frontally attack them and expose their shimmering metallic face; pitch-time processing dilemmas get dodged by exploding into the high frequency gleam embedded but hidden in their algorithms. Completely removed from the "Lo-Fi" paradigm seeking warmth or nostalgia, the present degradation-reconstructions result in newly audible chirp figures, the sparkle of aliasing and the descent into the grainy territory of microscopic sound events. From a more panoramic perspective, these tracks are continually transforming contraptions, with looping frames accelerating, doubling, halting or stuttering, overloading, seemingly struggling to buffer, sometimes mixing with immiscible materials to form a glistening suspension of new sound material.

// Hakeem Lapointe (Amselysen) about the album
"Stemming from confusion, indignation, and feeling disoriented, Hypnagogic Surge appeals to dream-like lenses that reinterpret the everyday world; words lose clarity and are reduced to phonemes and their perceived energy, well-known advert jingles and hit songs are obfuscated and develop into undecipherable melodies, feelings ranging from relief to aggression flash quickly into succession without rhyme or reason. In the awareness gaps of the dream state, information is made up and averaged into confusing erroneous approximations — here translated in the poised presence of aural artifacts such as bad mp3 bit rate shimmer, 1/8in inlet pops, bad aliasing and interpolation, unshielded cable radio interference, fake stereo, inverted polarizing, etc
Amselysen’s nightmarish interpretation of the hypnagogic state is heavily informed by tropes surrounding hardcore music, only this time the tropes are removed from their context and reimagined before reappearing into the album, thus resulting in a hyperreality; a simulacra of hardcore, intensity and dynamism. Remediating genres like punk, techno, metal, rap and noise through distant mimicry and radical sampling, Hypnagogic Surge approaches liminal reverie with a garish maximalist attitude."

// eurasiandesert about the design
"The image is an absence surging like waves, forcefully, from the black. It was: born, transparent, translucent, fluid. The trace of a mountain, peeking through memories, visiting me without my consent in my burial. A viscous coat and elastic, crawling on the surface of the objects like overlapping tearings, interferences. It is: rabid; enraged. It is not: theft; subtraction – but it fluctuates between moments of subtraction and the sand. It shows the perfect horrific picture and manages to keep the warmths it raises unutterable. Being blinded, being decimated, falling as-saulted into slow tremors, being followed, being motionless: that's how shapes surge and how they make their way through the silence. They are emptifiers, creatures just waking."

// Amselysen bio
Amselysen is Montreal-based intermedia artist Hakeem Lapointe’s latest musical project. It focuses on approaching experimental electronics with a critical lens, bridging the gap between conceptual spaces typically reserved to institutional practices and accessible aural aesthetics. Usually described as an outsider artist, never privy to the music academia and alien to most of the underground scene, Lapointe sheds all concerns for musical conventions and pursues their own sonic obsessions, which commonly sit in the leftfield genre. Their current work process ponders on indeterminacy, plunderphonics, hyperrealities, cultural foraging, and hypnagogia.
Works, outside of their own visual practice, include scores and sound design for short films, performances and installations in various exhibitions, including the After Hours at the McCord presented under Kent Monkman - Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience.