Exploratory digital imprint Pax Aeternum presents the second album from electronic/ambient project Interstitia, Hermes Slips The Trap.
Asheville, North Carolina resident Graham Scala is a punk/hardcore musician who plays with Harmonic Cross, Bleach Everything, Collapse Culture, Arepo, USX, Souvenirs Young America, Highness, Forensics, and many other bands also featured on his resume which now spans more than two decades.
Though previous efforts as Interstiitia saw Scala moving away from more aggressive guitar-based music he’s previously made in favour of a more spacious, textural, electronic approach, This latest full-length pushes that methodology to extremes. Ambient synth textures are overlaid upon frantic, in-the-red breakbeats then shredded by other noise textures. Described as being like “Four Tet playing a Providence basement show or Blanck Mass on a Black Dice kick”, Hermes Slips The Trap immerses the listener in a unique sound world that blends melody with noise.
Boasting more than fifty minutes of music through six tracks, all sounds, art, mixing, and mastering for Hermes Slips The Trap was handled by Graham Scala, with conceptual inspiration from Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World and Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key.
Scala offers, “This release marked a pretty sharp left turn from my previous releases. I’ve never been good at making anything too polished or refined so instead of trying to disabuse myself of those tendencies I embraced them. But while I was invested in making something stranger and noisier, I didn’t want it to be too dense or inaccessible. I’d been listening to a lot of Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby and thought it could be cool to incorporate harp as a melodic counterbalance to the rest of the song. While the end result can be a little disorienting, I feel like this track best captures my intent to embrace contrasts of chaos and tranquility.”
To be featured on Aural Delights 452 (29th July) and Overflow 77 (1st August).
Different Noises 