BILLY GOMBERG
capacity
available for purchase here
mastered by Taylor Deupree
limited to 200 LPs
comes with an 8-page booklet of Gomberg’s photography
Rather inspiringly, Billy Gomberg is experiencing a career peak in his second decade of composition and improvisation. Through a practice that is humble and rigorous in equal measure, he has issued work with Students of Decay and Dinzu Artefacts alongside numerous self-released editions that document his evolving approach to modular synthesis. Though Gomberg has shared many longform recordings, Capacity, his first proper album in four years, finds him zeroing in on nine gorgeously potent modes for the LP format.
Much like how a shard of glass can be penetrative and prismatic in the same moment, the textures of capacity exist in a space that is glowing and jagged, full of fleeting gestures but often anchoring everything with an elemental stillness. One can hear cues from the jittery glitch work of artists like Microstoria and Josh Mason here, but—and yeah, this is cliched but sincere—Gomberg’s work here is determinedly its own thing. This is music not fascinated with its own connection to the technology that facilitated it; rather, it’s in dialogue with a certain emotional and physical geography. Viewed through this lens, it makes sense that Gomberg also is a gifted photographer.
On that last note: the LP is accompanied by a striking booklet of black and white photographs of Gomberg’s from recent years. Your experience as a viewer and listener might mirror each other—an integration with landscape, a revealing of layers, and an appreciation of palpable beauty.
PRESS
“Remarkably engaging glitch-ambience from hyper-prolific San Francisco based sound artist Billy Gomberg, which has every right to be considered in the same breath as the likes of genre greats Oval, Jan Jelinek, Fennesz and so forth… at its best, the loops of stutters, feedback, noise and decay offer a vivid conveyance of our human place within the world at that interface where the natural and the artificial meet. It’s hard to place much of these sounds, but that’s besides the point, for it’s what they impress that matters. Suffused with a kind of lingering pathos, I found much of these 35 minutes to be unexpectedly emotional, almost elegiac at times. A genuine out-of-nowhere year contender for sure.” - World of Echo
“On the same plane as the other releases on occasional imprint Florabelle, electroacoustic drone generator Billy Gomberg establishes this small, low-lit, playful smear of tones, organs, ring modulators and jittery, early EDM machine stumbles across nine peerless tracks. Imagine if Boards of Canada dropped the tape loops, went back to their console and tried to get those same evocative statements out the hard way, and you’re on the way to the thoughtful, textured, sneakily elaborate float that’s going on inside Capacity. Gomberg makes these signals burn, ache, groan and ultimately become conversant with one another across quietly beautiful arrays of shifting sounds in a given key, painting the right notes and cues across the digital staff. Really, really beautiful stuff here on a label that has yet to miss.” - Heathen Disco
“Billy’s etheric and curiously searching sound has perhaps never felt as fully formed and confident as it does on his latest work capacity (released just a few weeks ago on Florabelle), its shifting harmonics and percolating textures conjuring images of a rich and pristine alien environment, its unplaceable field recordings like momentarily captured snapshots of unseen natural phenomena, too vast to comprehend in their entirety.” - Ghost Tropics
“Billy Gomberg’s music knows how to take the time to move through space and lead us into territories tinged with hazy colors, heaps of textures intersecting different materials, to obtain elusive titles evaporating through luminous interstices of ephemeral density.
Capacity tests our patience, plays with our ability to stay focused and follow the gilded field recordings tagged on cellulose walls. Strings of sounds dance on shards of glass, diffusing their halo of music through funnels directed towards a floating dreamlike beyond.” - Silence and Sound (translated)
Quisque iaculis facilisis lacinia. Mauris euismod pellentesque tellus sit amet mollis.