Ambient Post-Rock Artist ALASKAN TAPES Announces New Album; Shares Track
January 15, 2021 BY Nettwerk
Today, Alaskan Tapes announces his new album, For Us Alone, will be released on April 16, 2021. The moniker represents Toronto-based composer Brady Kendall’s ever-evolving ambient music project. The record will be Kendall’s fifth outing and follows his 2019 full-length Views From Sixteen Stories.
Alaskan Tapes explains, “On ‘For Us Alone’ there isn’t as much of a story as there is a simple concept: I wanted to continue the sound I was going for on ‘Views From Sixteen Stories’ and make the songs I was trying to finish by the end of that process. Of course, some songs have their own personal story, but it’s also not uncommon for a track to be written just because it sounds nice. There’s more structure to these songs, which still segue nicely from the end of the last album.”
Kendall wrote the nine songs on For Us Alone in three groups of three, and as a result the music flows cohesively from one track to the next. Exactly three songs feature drums—one in each suite, a technique that helps flesh out the groups and connect them to the whole. Everything was written and recorded in Kendall’s home studio space in the apartment where he lives with his girlfriend about an hour north of Toronto; strings were added remotely by Jonathan Dreyfuss in Berlin, who was the only musician aside from Kendall to play on the album. The recording embraces the imperfect nature in which it was made, from ambient blips that add texture and depth to the low hum of a conversation elsewhere in his home to the intentionally muddy way the electronic drums were captured.
LISTEN TO (AND SHARE) “The Sky Sings Its Chorus (For Us Alone) [Pt.1]”:
Today, he shares the atmospheric post-rock single, “The Sky Sings Its Chorus (For Us Alone) [Pt.1],” which premiered yesterday on mxdwn. Kendall adds, “It is my attempt at creating a track that’s contrasted with the other tracks in the context of the album. When it’s compared to my other tracks it’s very heavy and I think you can hear the ‘Metal’ side of my writing coming out.”
Growing up, Brady played the drums in metal bands before he discovered the drum & bass scene. He started to create and post liquid drum & bass tracks online before becoming more focused on what he calls “drawn-out minimal sounds.” Out of these style tracks, the project was born. Starting in early 2016 with the debut EP Beyond the Streets and then a full-length, We All Speak in Poems, later that same year, Alaskan Tapes began releasing a steady stream of music that gradually ebbed and flowed into new sonic territory and served as a natural progression of Kendall’s tastes and sound experiments. From the initial atmospheric electronica and beat-less ambient songs of that first pair of records to neoclassical dream pop, guitar-based ambient, and drone music—some songs
Stay tuned for more to come from Alaskan Tapes.
