JASON CALHOUN + FORESTEPPE
a four part cure LP
available for purchase on LP and digital here
mastered by A.F. Jones
limited to 200 LPs
comes with a double-sided color insert
Jason Calhoun and Foresteppe (longtime alias of Egor Klochikhin) now share a second cross-continental collaboration that is disarming in its fragility and emotional awareness. Grounded in the delicate interplay of piano, bass and the rustling pulse of everyday sounds, a four part cure offers a chance to come in from the cold while simultaneously providing the cold itself.
Anyone who encountered their first album together, 2020's pieces of death, experienced a remarkable longform journey into a soundworld that juxtaposed mourning and vitality, banal routine and heightened awareness. Using a similar approach to forming new work, Calhoun and Klochikhin mailed elements to each other for months before emerging with four untitled pieces that were then edited for maximum impact on LP. (Their correspondences, excerpts of which serve as liner notes for the album, demonstrate the same warmth and integrity found in the music.) Finding freedom in an intentionally limited group of instruments and sound sources, both artists use improvisation and motifs to create music that pushes forward, even when doing so can seem overwhelming.
"Keeping it simpler feels right," Calhoun wrote to Klochikhin in the process of piecing the music together. Given the prior releases that Calhoun and Klochikhin have separately shepherded, it is perhaps not a surprise that a four part cure contains a wealth of small gestures that reflect the thoughtfulness and empathy of its creators. If it's not a surprise, then, it's a treasure all the same.
PRESS FORTHCOMING
“Minimal instrumentation (piano, bass) combine with rhythmic bits of everyday sound. The result, both fragile and engaging, melds post-classical, ambient jazz, and lowercase.” - Marc Weidenbaum, Disquiet
“Anchored throughout by an especially lonely sounding piano, meditative 'Ambient Americana' guitar and the crunch of field recording footsteps on, what sounds like, frosted grass, the pair evoke what is a particularly brumal scene, an early morning vista caught under the blanket of winter…intimate, private world compositions with a blissful, elemental quality.” - World of Echo