New Music: Fugue State – Floating

After Nothing Comes, the new Fugue State album, features a series of adventurous and inventive soundscapes, with none being more notable than Floating.

The bubbling classical motifs of the piano and the wind instrument’s reflection of the invisible but tangible movement of air find themselves buoyed in time and space by the vocals. The latter seem to float in and about the piece as a whole, fragments of humanity on familiar man-made sounds. That familiarity has shifted out of its expected paradigms, leaving you feeling both comforted and dislocated, as if indeed floating above events as an interested, passionate observer.

Fugue State is a collaborative musical project directed by composer and producer Dan Langa, who assembled a cohort of fellow artists to create a work that you can almost taste and feel, such is the vividness of Floating, and other works on the album, such as Dark.

Says Langa about the piece and its place within the overall schema of the album, “Floating stands out as it is one of the more organic-sounding tracks and approaches to production on the project. Elias Stemeseder takes the opening figure and expands it outward throughout the track. The listener can witness the sonic warping happening in real time, up until the point the track blooms near the end.”

After Nothing Comes was released on the 22nd of May via Switch Hit Records and can be found on Bandcamp in digital and limited-edition cassette formats. Fugue State will perform an album release show at Ki Smith Gallery in New York on the 30th of May.

Header photo by A L E X S. K. B R O W N