Furtherset - To Live Tenderly Anew (2020)

«I am interested in pushing the compositional methods I’ve developed to their limits. I’m interested in density, intensity, fragility, and emotions.» - Furtherset

Furtherset returns to -OUS with his album ‘To Live Tenderly Anew’, following his EPs ‘To Alter and Affect’ and ‘Drawings of Desire and Hate’. He notes: “I think of my previous two EPs for -OUS and this album as a trilogy, where this album is the final chapter”. Furtherset is in search of hidden connections beyond harmonies and rhythm. Melodies are repeated until they reach their breaking point. Moments of relief are drowned out in densely packed sound. Intensity is maximized to the nth degree, creating a crest point that threatens to overwhelm pre-existing traces of activity completely.

The opening track ‘To Live Tenderly Anew’ begins with a fragile melody, only to erupt into pulsating synthesizer figures that continuously expand, before pulverizing into sharp, noise-flecked fragments, and finally dissolving into an ambient pad. Midway-through ‘The Logic of a Secret’, the music finally sparks into Furtherset’s signature arpeggio patterns, sprinting over a powerful bassline. The album finally climaxes with ‘Choirs of Deception and Truth’, a beatless rave hymn, before it, too, dissolves into deep space. Using only synthesizers, Furtherset creates metamorphic music, drawing on ambient, modern classical and rave, and building on his individual approach to composition, where long fades and periodic cuts continuously transform the scene.

The album’s title references Amelia Rosselli’s 1956 poem ‘Diario in tre lingue’, in which the experimental writer - who was born in exile in Paris, moved to the UK after the murder of her anti-fascist activist father, was educated in the US and finally settled in Rome - charts relations between the Italian, the French & the English. This poem laid the groundwork for her singular trilingual poetry, a body of work engaged in the research of tradition, and how tradition is passed on in disjointed manifestations.