Bates, Steve: An Infinite Antenna LP

Montréal-based sound artist Steve Bates expands his strategies and stylistic influences on "An Infinite Antenna", his second solo album for Constellation, giving freer reign to melodic components and textural dynamics: leftfield synth work, deconstructed drum machine, pointillist electric guitar, and radiostatic blur are all part of the new brew swirling around his bruitist signal-bending and field-recording sensibility. Arguably a more ambient album than his acclaimed 2022 Constellation debut "All The Things That Happen", "An Infinite Antenna" is at the same time more densely packed with ideas, dynamics, evocations and earworms. Where "All The Things That Happen" was noisier and single-minded, made with the self-imposed limit of a Casio SK-1, Bates plays more widely with instrumentation and atmospheres on "An Infinite Antenna", also drawing on his post-hardcore roots in seeking a sort of track-by-track concision nonetheless driven by the album's coherence as a seamless work.