THOMAS BEY WILLIAM BAILEY

A completely new, original album from me - available on CD and streaming / downloadable audio. This is (I mean it this time) one of my best works overall. Almost totally abandoning the frigid digital textures of its distant ancestor "Strangelet," this one aims for an almost unsettling intimacy with which to accompany a noir-drenched journey into songs of unstable identity and uncertain final destinations.

While "Metaphysics..." features many elements that will be familiar to my supporters, there are some wholly new sonic colors in the palette: emphatic choral voices, ringing metallic percussion, various Moog growls and murmurs. In many places you'll encounter a (for me) atypical "old school" musique concrete feel, in terms of the rapid instrumental interchanges, and this is meant to provide a sense of contrast and continuity with other segments of strange, spectral, "post-industrial" ambience.

We talk a lot in these unpleasant days of sound and music as therapy (don't forget Albert Ayler: "music is the healing force of the universe"). So, in an unorthodox way, this is my contribution. Much of my personal frustration with life comes from an inexplicable, perpetual need to be Somewhere Else, and with this album I hope to conjure up a virtual space that will be just that for its listeners. It is meant to be that Somewhere Else, but not a virtual space to be "escaped" into so much as one that reflects back aspects of existence in a vividly distorted way that will illuminate what is meaningful and what isn't.

Influenced / guided by (and therefore probably appealing to fans of) Giacinto Scelsi, Francis Dhomont, Iannis Xenakis, Sonic Arts Union, Coil, Nurse with Wound... 

(artist info)