Photo by Elena Solotroff
Electronic music veteran, artist, multi-instrumentalist/noise mastermind MARK SOLOTROFF will release his latest solo album, Today The Infinite, Tomorrow Zero, on November 3rd.
Today The Infinite, Tomorrow Zero is the follow-up to SOLOTROFF’s 2021-released album, Not Everybody Makes It and features ten songs, each running exactly six-minutes in length. SOLOTROFF characterizes it as a continuation of his voyage through experimental ambient and drone, and it finds him refining concepts that he’s been developing for several years, down to more digestible portions of music.
For this album, SOLOTROFF worked with a variety of vintage analog synths, recorded directly to a four-track cassette deck, which remains his preferred arrangement. At their foundation, each song was built from multiple layers of synth. SOLOTROFF then wove in loops that sometimes sit more prominently and more melodically and that sometimes appear in a more spectral fashion. SOLOTROFF’s own voice adds further dimension to some songs, but he processed it so it became a layer of sound closer in nature to synth patterns or distorted frequencies.
SOLOTROFF created numerous mixes of the ten songs, striving to find a sweet spot where it could be enjoyed through a home stereo with speakers, through a car system, through headphones, and through now ubiquitous earbuds. After discussing approaches with mastering engineer Collin Jordan, SOLOTROFF was extremely pleased with how versatile the master turned out. That said, he admits that the low-end frequencies he embedded in each song remain best experienced through speakers or capable headphones. Of this, he’s unapologetic. It’s an album for people who appreciate the deep end.
While SOLOTROFF found the internal or isolated time during the pandemic to be extremely productive, in a creative sense, once the world started to reopen, he quickly dove back into an external life of social interaction, live performance, travel, and a significantly restructured work/life balance that gave him a greater appreciation of his free creative time. Coming out of the pandemic, SOLOTROFF wanted to move forward from not only his attempts to put his own experiences of loss into sound, but to move past the collective grief that so deeply permeated the music world over the last few years. While Today The Infinite, Tomorrow Zero will likely never be accused of being a happy or optimistic sounding album, for SOLOTROFF, it demonstrates the evolution of his sound work and of his artistic path, and he sees it as representing a more positive impression of nostalgia and an internal drive that is open to possibility, for today, at least.
In advance of the release of Today The Infinite, Tomorrow Zero, SOLOTROFF today unveils first single, “The Weight Of Your Own,” noting of the track, “‘The Weight Of Your Own’ sits at the beginning of my new album because it introduces the exact balance of sounds that I’ve been working towards for the last few years. Its prominent, yet abstract loop sets the tone for the hour of music that follows. While I was working on the album, I had to consciously stop myself from simply following the pattern and making nine more versions of this song. Rather, I used it as in indicator of the mood of the album that unfolds before the listener. I also had to fight myself to not let the song spool out for thirty-minutes, or more, and allowing the loop to become a more enveloping, hypnotic device. That’s where I was, before. Right now, I’m trying to create more concise compositions. Maybe I actually did create an epic version? If so, I’ll keep it for private use.”
Stream MARK SOLOTROFF’s “The Weight Of Your Own” at THIS LOCATION.
Today The Infinite, Tomorrow Zero will be released on four-panel digipak CD and digitally on all major platforms. Find preorders at the official MARK SOLOTROFF Bandcamp page HERE.
Today The Infinite, Tomorrow Zero Track Listing:
- The Weight Of Your Own
- Arguments Of Strain
- Keeping Themselves To Themselves
- Desire Without Wounds
- The Study Of One
- You May Slip Between
- Almost All Promises
- The Testimony Of Modern Art
- Restoring Contact With Experience
- The Hold On Life
MARK SOLOTROFF is a Chicago-based musician and a visual artist who has worked within the experimental, post-industrial, noise, and metal scenes, dating back to the mid-1980s. SOLOTROFF is best known as the vocalist of both the doom band Anatomy Of Habit and the heavy electronic band BLOODYMINDED, and as the founder of the early American post-industrial band Intrinsic Action. His work with analog synthesizers dates back to his earliest recordings and he continues to find new ways to work with these often-unpredictable instruments. SOLOTROFF pursues several related themes in his work, including how cities develop, both organically and through organized planning, how the human body navigates urban environments, and how people navigate and interact with each other, particularly in an age of alienation caused by severe digital fragmentation. His visual work frequently features urban landscapes, architecture, and infrastructure, and he has become increasingly active in his use of artificial intelligence in his art. He’s published three books of pictures that include his own photography, found images, and AI-generated images, all of which he processes in a manner related to how he processes sound.
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