Photo by Elena Solotroff
Everything Is Noise is currently streaming “Almost All Promises” from electronic music veteran, artist, multi-instrumentalist, and noise mastermind MARK SOLOTROFF. The track comes off of SOLOTROFF’s forthcoming solo record, Today The Infinite, Tomorrow Zero, set for release 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.
Offers SOLOTROFF of his latest single, “‘Almost All Promises’ might be the calmest and prettiest song that I’ve ever created, particularly due to the complex melody that loops in and out. I’m slowly getting used to these types of compositions emanating from my head. Don’t let this wolf in sheep’s clothing fool you, though. What’s the easiest way to ‘fill in the blank’ with this title? I know that for me, it would read, ‘Almost All Promises Are BROKEN.’ Therein lies the very essence of this album and its title, in its most reductive form. Today you are promised something, and tomorrow that promise is broken, leaving you with ZERO.”
Adds Everything Is Noise, “Spectral by design and ethereal by nature, ‘Almost All Promises’ exemplifies the remainder of the album in essence. The whole album was recorded directly to a four-track tape recorder as layered synths, then looped to achieve various outcomes that each stand on their own, whether in a more melodic and lush or more grating and haunting manner. While ‘Almost All Promises’ relies more heavily on the beautiful end of the scope, it isn’t bereft of that inexplicable feeling of yearning and emotive dearth one can experience from time to time, and not in the least during the autumns, [a time of] oddly beautiful sceneries made up of dying things, migrating birds, freezing sunlit mornings, and a very particular kind of mood that sets the mind in a somewhat sullen ease, before the seemingly endless darkness of winter sets in…”
Read more and stream “Almost All Promises,” now playing at Everything Is Noise, at THIS LOCATION.
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.
Today The Infinite, Tomorrow Zero was mastered by Collin Jordan and will be released on four-panel digipak CD and digitally on all major platforms.
Find preorders at the official MARK SOLOTROFF Bandcamp page HERE where first single, “The Weight Of Your Own,” can be streamed.
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.
https://marksolotroff.com
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https://marksolotroff.bandcamp.com
https://open.spotify.com/artist/1qzS0Txu14VyMELnNLjspk
https://music.apple.com/us/artist/mark-solotroff/342943745
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