Album Notes

Northern’s debut offering, another in Infraction’s sweet sleep-stream of supine-inclined ambience, are bros of Canada, Davin and Kevin Chong, dealers in heating up cool digitalia with toasty warm sample food. Drawn is a study in turning lost to found sound, capturing momentary guitar passes, and releasing them, subtly altered, into enduring motifs, finding felicity in the fleeting and making it stay awhile to become compelling. What happens is that this Northern music initially seems to drift by asking nothing from you, but you gradually find yourself, oddly, wanting from it. And it yields graciously. In being quiet, unwanting, you want to be quiet with it. It’s the New Quiet.

The album opens with “Coasting” in zones that distantly recall those charted by Loscil (Submers and First Narrows), the aqueous becoming a subtle leitmotif (cf. the later “Pacific”). The architecture becomes more digitally-enhanced, espousing sound 12k principles. Shuttle358, Taylor Deupree, and Fourcolor would all seem to be Northern touchstones, sharing a similar delight in deployment of small gesture processed loopstrata, fluting, floating, fibrillating – at once a surface over which to skitter a glitch-scatter and a cushion for repose. No fear of Northern exposure here at the warmer end of digital, gently meshing textures, lapping into laptop. It’s a deceptively small sound that can get big on you, like on “Migrate”, which dwells in semi-stasis just long enough to lull, then spills over with swells before slipping out of sight. Drawn’s digital means of generation takes on an increasingly naturalistic sounding aspect helped by its manipulated guitar-enriched intake. The guitar tradition drawn on Drawn is the ostinato introspections and plucked intimacies of 1 mile North, Labradford, and Dan Abrams. Ostensibly different from Infraction stable signature sound, it somehow sits comfortably within it.

The CD is housed in a mini-lp gatefold Stoughton style sleeve.

"This is the album that drew our attention to Infraction. Northern's sound is just simply a delicious cocktail of melodic drones and ambient textures that will lull you with it's sleepy and enchanting sound. Gorgeously processed tones are layered to give you a sense of peaceful melancholy and the tracks really do have a subtle, dreamlike quality. I'd rate this as one of my favourite releases of the year so far to be perfectly honest and with not a single note out of place this gets a big thumbs up and a huge recommendation. Great artist, great label." - smallfish records U.K.