Deathprod 'Occulting Disk' 2xLP

Deathprod, a.k.a. Helge Sten, has been deeply embedded in the Oslo music community for decades, but his brooding soundscapes and deliberate process make him seem sometimes like a phantom. Sten is a founding member of Supersilent, adding his sounds and treatments to the avant jazz leanings of that powerful collective, and he has collaborated with artists as diverse as Biosphere, and Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones.

But Occulting Disk is the first new Deathprod album in 15 years; his attention to detail is next level, and the darkly powerful soundscapes arch and swell like the shifting of the Earth’s tectonic plates. Raw, emotional, political and deliberate, this is ambient music with deep intention.

 

Fans of Arca, Oneohtrix Point Never, Tim Hecker, Steve Reich, Autechre, Swans, and GAS will all need this record – Deathprod makes some of the most powerful experimental ambient composition of our time. His last LP, Morals and Dogma, from 2004, was listed as one of Pitchfork’s top 50 ambient albums of all time. FACT calls Sten the “dark ambient master.” The New York Times said “Sten loves to summon up thick, often ominous clouds of sound, gesturing at everything from avant-garde composition to black metal without ever quite revealing his hand.”

 

Occulting Disk is an anti-fascist ritual. Recorded in Oslo, Reykjavik, Berlin and Los Angeles between 2012 and 2019. Liner notes by Will Oldham. LP cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, Berlin. NEED SPECIFIC NOTES ON THE ARTWORK.

 

Some “sales notes” on Occulting Disk from Will Oldham, who also wrote the album liner notes:

 

“I remember driving over a mountain with my mother, she was in the passenger seat and we were being mauled and cuddled and battered and fried by sound; together. We were together experiencing something previously unimaginable, and we were facing the same direction, and we were moving through space and time knowing that a geographic destination some way ahead would bring an end. And the sound surrounded us, and for once our mutual silence was loaded with good. Because we were in the presence of each other, and we knew so much about how we had failed each other (it wasn’t a mystery any more), and we knew how we had maimed others when we worried too much about ourselves, how we had contributed to the faults of others simply by focusing in instead of out. Our mutual silences were laden with what that could only be called love. I used to hear love in music until I learned to hear love in sound. “ (Will Oldham)

 

Catalogue number: STS360LP

Condition: New

Label: Smalltown Supersound