Since the mid-aughts, Chicago trio Haptic (Adam Sonderberg, Joseph Clayton Mills, and Steven Hess—this time around featuring Salvatore Dellaria and The Necks’ Tony Buck) has delivered riveting, meticulously controlled live sets, as well as a handful of releases mainly on the Entr’acte label, all of which reflect the group’s unique attitudes toward collaboration and structure. This release features material sourced from a variety of past recordings; they are without form and yet architectural, and just as uniquely engaging as the group’s previous work.
From the perspective of Notice, Haptic’s mixture of the organic and the industrial has been profoundly influential, and could even be said to define a quintessential Chicago ethos channeled through dark ambience: roiling waves of density, structure, work, beauty, and oppression constantly overtaking each other. However, the final silence will always be present—and is expected—just like the spare, steady late-night call of a single circling black bird.
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"While Sonderberg has recently returned to Chicago and Haptic to the stage, neither was the case when they assembled Excess of Vision. They took leftover, previously unused recordings from throughout their existence, including some early improvisations with Necks drummer Tony Buck and contributions from Salvatore Dellaria, and assembled them into a sonic comment upon their discontinuous state. On “So for the Remainder,” which takes up all of side one of this album length cassette, the long, slowly evolving tones that used to get Haptic rather reductively characterized as a drone outfit are once more presented. But they are layered, interleaved, and twisted together so that they interfere with each other and are in constant low-key flux. Heard inattentively, it might seem that nothing is happening, but if you get close enough you’ll notice that the constancy is an illusion." - Bill Meyer, Dusted
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Performed by Steven Hess, Joseph Clayton Mills, and Adam Sonderberg with Tony Buck (I) and Salvatore Dellaria (II)
Assembled by Mills/Sonderberg
Mixed by Sonderbeg
Mastered by Tomas Korber
Artwork and layout by E. Lindorff-Ellery
Available as 320k MP3 or 16bit FLAC
Tracklisting:
1. So For The Remainder - 23:23
2. And Otherwise - 23:39
