Jeremy Young – Amaro LP

Montreal-based electroacoustic composer Jeremy Young’s new record, Amaro, is more like a suite of meaningful multi-disciplinary duets than a new addition to his growing catalog of pure solo material. Yet it centrally documents an iterative, systems-based approach to making music that Young has been developing and refining through live performances and improvisations in his studio for close to 3 years. This sonic « system » is not modular but tactile, performable, and tourable, and includes: 3 individual oscillators (sine, square, triangle) tuned microtonally by hand in real time and filtered, amplified surfaces and objects that make up the pieces’ rhythmic foundations, tape loop fragments of found tape, and EMF signal captured and routed across the tonal and textural signal paths.

Amaro includes contributions from artists here in Montreal such as Deanna Radford, Markus Floats, and Ida Toninato, and those based in New York and beyond, like Vito Ricci, Dolphin Midwives, Pauline Kim Harris, Tomonari Nishikawa, and Johannes Bergmark. The album’s beautiful cover visuals come courtesy of frequent collaborators, China Marsot-Wood and Thaïla Khampo. It’s an experimental suite of sonic material, adventurous, and not over-produced; neither ambient nor noise, synthesized yet performed in real time as if it were an instrumental record.