Meridian Arc: Continuum LP

Availability:

Out of stock

For the past decade, Meridian Arc has been a vehicle for Andrew Crawshaw to explore the liminal reaches where analog circuitry teeters from metronomic perfection into free-form textural soundbaths and percolating blissed-out abstraction. While equally rooted in the classic sounds of vintage synths and the modern frequencies of a labyrinthine Eurorack, Meridian Arc glides into astral unknowns while tethered to the terra firma of time-worn and readily available technology. But on his fourth album Continuum, Crawshaw’s solo venture into astral spaces was sidelined by the gravity of mortality. Diagnosed with a congenital heart issue, Crawshaw was rushed into emergency surgery and subjected to a lengthy convalescence. Though as is often the case when art is made in life-or-death situations, this potentially debilitating development provided new clarity on the direction for his latest masterwork. Rather than locking into cycles of repetition, Continuum takes a linear approach, employing patterns not as hypnotic sonic mantras but as pathways into new spaces. Though presented as seven songs, Continuum is really one journey across a myriad of terrains, a progression from point A to point B taken at a pace that allows the listener to take in the full grandeur of the landscape. Loose arrangements had been mapped out prior to Crawshaw’s surgery, but with the foundation of those structures now revealed to be fallible, it became imperative to reveal the frailty at the literal heart of Meridian Arc. Melodic leads were taken as single takes to reinforce the human component of the music. Vacillating between the sinister and the sublime, Continuum touches upon the spectrum of our lived experiences, moving forward as the mechanization of fate churns along its ordained course while its subject pushes and pulls at its tempo in hopes of altering its trajectory. And perhaps there is something to be said about the salvation of technology, its ability to battle our mortal fears by enforcing structure upon organic chaos, and the subjugation we risk by putting so much stake in the tools we create. And perhaps there is a crucial reminder that all the self-imposed geometry and detailed schematics won’t necessarily save us. But by wresting control back from the binary world we’ve made, we have an opportunity to take our imaginings to new heights, to loosen the tether to the familiar and push beyond the known reaches, and to chart the distance between the extremes of near incapacitation to ascendent triumph.