If glitchy little dust particles sending out Morse code via slight alterations in biometric pressure are your thing — and if not, you’re reading the wrong website at the moment — then Josh Mason’s forthcoming album, Coquina Dose, is your thing, at least judging by the two tracks up for pre-release streaming on the Bandcamp page of the releasing label, Florabelle.
The full album is due out March 22, but for now we’ve got “Crack the Juice Code,” the opening track, and “Key Blight” the album’s third. The first is a beautifully understated conglomeration of soft tones and small noises, of sound as texture and of texture as melody. Throughout there’s a very light patter of white noise. It’s vinyl surface dust experienced as environmental data.
The other track feels like it takes us, quite suddenly, outside. The noise of “Juice Code” is traded for bird chatter, at roughly the same volume: not so much distant as background, the room tone of a porch. Both are marked with backward masking, which lends a retrospective, hindsight-gaze quality to the music — so, too, little wisps of warbling pitch changes. On “Key Blight” these latter shifts suggest time being bent, nudged, and suffering small impacts. The music is composed from — comprised of — nothing but such modest materials.
Album first posted at florabelle.bandcamp.com. More from Mason at joshmason.info. More from Florabelle at florabellerecords.com.