Winter, Max: One Thousand Lonely Places LP

Max Winter’s music seeks to traverse a breadth of styles – a world where freewheeling jazzwise drum workouts linger behind silk bass and glooming electronics, where compositional flurries of flute, cello, keys, and violin playfully exchange with restrained melodic ambience, where driving & pummelling big drop productions resurface as introverted pop stunners, where crystalline vocal melodies float above terminator slap bass sessions… it’s literally all going on…and all at the same time. Max holds that rare ability to serve as a vector for his own sweeping ideas, to think something and ‘just do it’ – coming from a jazz & classical compositional background Max writes everything, plays everything, and masterfully grasps everything. To be frank, ‘One Thousand Lonely Places’ has ended up being one of the most mysterious and exciting things we’ve ever put out.

Max strives to bring a very human element / approach to his electronic compositions, perhaps a result of the tactile nature of his classical training, he injects a unique rawness into his sound world via vocal experiments which breathe (literally) emotional states into much of the work, building and elevating his sound with the big room pieces, and pushing the other end extreme of anxious isolation deeper into the walls.

There’s no denying the strong pop sensibility that permeates ‘One Thousand Lonely Places’, hushed vocal parts are shared between Max and recurring guest IMOGEN, and there’s a definite structure within the chaos, but this is mostly an odd, isolated, experimental take on formal song structure - walking the same restrained, understated pathways forged by bands such as Talk Talk and The Necks one moment, and then the next minute pointing towards the likes Arto Lindsey & Bill Laswell’s more playful forms of No Wave, and then from there gazing towards the future focus of musically informed, genre less freedom explored by artists such as Laurel Halo, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. All of these touchpoints are subtly underpinned with an understanding and appreciation of classical & quiet music forms of composition encompassed and explored by masters such as Akira Rabelais, Harold Budd, David Sylvian.