Ezekiel Honig - Unmapping The Distance Keeps Getting Closer (2024)

12k is very happy to help usher in the return of Ezekiel Honig, a New York City-based artist and founder of both the Anticipate Recordings and Microcosm labels, which have released music from Sawako, Nicola Ratti and Mark Templeton, among others, throughout the 2000s.

Honig returns with Unmapping the Distance Keeps Getting Closer, an album of very stark, and often dark and vulnerable music. Honig describes the work in the context of the feeling of listening while walking through the city, and then the forest. While this seems like a placid activity, there is definitely an air of unease, created by distorted and fragmented sounds. Piano, horns and broken rhythms make up the sonic palette; however these don’t present themselves with clarity and definition, but rather are hinted at by the pulling apart and reconstruction of spectral elements. The sonic origins... analog, digital, acoustic, are unclear. Unmapping, remapping, and unexpected.

Throughout his discography, Honig has often made use of field recordings as a strong narrative within his musical composition. He uses these to evoke a sense of place, either abstractly for mood or as an intentional, conceptual connection to the theme of the work. Unmapping keeps this tradition and does so with a more textural and tactile motive. Place is strong on this album, but the location is unknown and the journey melancholic, if a bit hopeful, as if there is a destination sought.