Andy Cartwright - Below The Noise (2023)

Andy Cartwright is an artist originally from Oxfordshire, UK who currently resides in the French Alps. Alongside his other projects Seabuckthorn and Mt Went, Andy’s work has been released through labels including Bookmaker Records, Lost Tribe Sound, Eilean, IIKKI, Fluid Audio, A Quiet Room Recording and, LAAPS. Andy’s taste in music flits between guitar-based bands and electronica; these sources of inspiration led to him creating electronic music under his own name since 2021 alongside the more acoustic-leaning work.

In this album, Andy departed from the more traditional song-writing style, in which he would normally play riffs and chords on a guitar before developing the composition. Instead, he headed straight for the computer. ‘Below the Noise’ is a series of microsound collages, built upon layered field recordings, synth drones and noises. Field recordings were captured on his phone, loaded into Ableton and then processed with lo-fi effects. Additional synth sounds were added and side-chained to a heavy noise track, which was muted. This reduced the track down almost into a microsound, which left lots of air and ghost fragments in the mix.

Andy was intrigued by the idea of filtering out all the harsh noise, as a mix technique to thin out the sounds. From here, the process led to the album’s name and overall concept. Traces of the original sound source can only be imagined, as it sits below the noise. The reduction method leaves us with this collection of dusty ambient drones, imbued with satisfying static and crackly ASMR textures.