Quicksails - Surface [CD]

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Chicago-based producer/multi-instrumentalist Ben Billington makes music under the name Quicksails. A pillar of the Chicago experimental scene and its branches across the midwest and national DIY circuits, Billington has enriched his communities through overlapping roles as a musician and curator / promoter of freak sounds for more than two decades.

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In addition to his work as a solo artist, he has performed with bands such as ONO, ADT, Circuit Des Yeux, Tiger Hatchery, and Ryley Walker's band. Billington's solo recordings as Quicksails encompass everything from free jazz-inspired electro-acoustic production to rhythmic synth-pulse tapestries to music focused on what could be considered one primary instrument among the many he works with: the drum kit and auxiliary percussion.

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Surface, his fifth release to appear on Hausu Mountain, combines all of these idioms into one diverse program while also expanding his palette to rope in his more recent experiments with touch-sensitive custom synthesizers and modular systems. Surface shimmers with a sense of tonal sophistication and emotional resonance that sets a high-water mark for the Quicksails project.

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The album's mind-bending juxtapositions of electronic and acoustic sound sources of contrasting fidelities charge each composition with energies at once alien and familiar -- rooted in free improvisation and jazz traditions while streaking off into realms of lush synth arrangement, and textural abstraction. Within Quicksails's dense fields of sound, one voice stands out with particularly bold contrast: the saxophone of modern experimental stalwart Patrick Shiroishi (Fuubutsushi, The Armed, a multitude of improvised collaborations on labels like Astral Spirits and Touch Records), who guests on three of the album's ten tracks. Shiroishi's sax performances alternately burst out in squalling atonal spirals and glow with neo-noir melodicism as if glimpsed in the smoke under a streetlamp on a darkened city corner.

Final Walk

Salt

Lost Breath

Sightless Squid

Chat Laugh

All of Alex

Footing

Piss + Moan

Hope Slide

Surface