Unit Holds

Derek Rogers' Mist & Drift was part of the very first Jehu &c. batch and, after a relatively quiet year by his prolific standards, we thought it was about time we invited him back into the fold. You can imagine how pleased we were when he announced to us he'd been working on new synthesizer music with his LA buddy Lee Noble (himself fresh from releasing the incredible Ruiner on Bathetic Records) and that they almost had something ready to go. What we were presented with was Unit Holds, a fizzing, buzzing journey through faded futures, forgotten pasts and the overwhelming present. The process, as Derek explains below, was one of discovery for both artists.

"This isn't the first recording session Lee and I have made together, but it's definitely the one that worked the best in terms of playing to each others' strengths. Lee had just purchased a modular synth, and he was just discovering this new and alien object. The results are stunning... not cold or calculated or academic – there's a humanity to it. The entire session was improvised; inherently, we knew it'd be fairly easy to determine who was making what sounds, but I think the idea was to fuse our techniques into one soundscape, or to make the two-headed beast a singular force. I played a synthesizer as well, run through a barrage of effects pedals and ending up processed in my laptop. It too is an alien object."

Unit Holds is limited to just 50 pro-dubbed blue tapes for the world and features artwork by Liz Pavlovich, Jheri Evans and Lee Noble.