Release date: 27th September 2024
Available to order now on Bandcamp: 6th September 2024
Track listing:
1. Hexa
2. Magnetic Bloom
3. Time in Return
4. 53S
5. Sunsickness
6. Ash
7. Oval Waters
Cleared, the duo of Steven Hess and Michael Vallera has re-emerged with Hexa, their sixth release and third for Touch. Steven Hess recorded sessions in the group’s practice space, handing them over to Vallera, who in turn added his home recordings, mixing and manipulating them. The final product provides only the barest of hints to any instrumental points of origin, such is the extent of their intermixture.
Hexa brings the listener interiority and depth, beginning with the slow build of the title track, where chiming details prompt a cycling drone. The “Magnetic Bloom” pulsations give way to granulated smears, while the well-named “Time in Return” plays with repetition and layering. The density in the tracks relents with “53S,” a recording from a train station contributed by the field recordist Chris Watson. The spatial sensations brought by the clanking and creaking offer a respite of sorts before the accretion of processed magnetics resume on the aptly entitled “Sunsickness.” Clouds of static overwhelm the initial melodies of “Ash.” Pulses, bursts, and points of electronics breach the layered blankets and sheets of sound, as with the concluding track, “Oval Waters.”
If you need to identify a genre locale, put Hexa on the side of the street where current electronic music lives. However you categorize the album, it is an absorbing listen front-to-back. Each track emerges with layers peeling and/or accreting and new details revealing themselves. [Bruce Adams, 2024]
All sound by Steven Hess and Michael Vallera
Arranged and mixed by Michael Vallera
Photography & design by Jon Wozencroft
Mastered by Denis Blackham
Audio for 53S recorded by Chris Watson
Reviews:
Boomkat (UK):
Cleared’s third album for Touch plays like a faded photograph, with only faint, dubbed-out traces left of any original instrumentation. Killer gear – like a Chain Reaction-coded take on electro-acoustic improv.
‘Hexa’ exists in two worlds simultaneously; the percussive, guitar-led soundscapes that dominated Steven Hess and Michael Vallera’s prior material still feel present here, but they’re reduced to a cinder, echoed into glitchy, rhythmic motifs that buzz and whirr rather than beat and drone. We described their last album, ‘Of Endless Light’ as “low-light dark ambience”, and it sounds like a stepping stone between their earliest material and this latest development. This time around, Hess dubbed sessions alone in the duo’s practice pad, leaving Vallera to add his own recordings and mix and process the results. It gives the album a feeling of distance: distance from the instrumentation, and distance from the process that grounded their formative sides.
The title track lays the groundwork, trapping a hissing, humid atmosphere that’s only ambient if you refuse to tune into its throbbing textures. Deep, throbbing bass hits fill out the low end, and Vallera’s chirring techniques are more Vladislav Delay than Deathprod. The duo’s intentions are revealed even further on ‘Magnetic Bloom’ and ‘Sunsickness’, the former in its dizzy haze of subs and lower-case Vainqueur-style stabs, and the latter with its circumspect pinprick rhythm, that quivers so subtly you could almost miss it on first blush. There are still reverberations of Hess’s elongated bowed cymbal work and Vallera’s dazed guitar fuzz, but they’ve been transformed, or even evolved – ‘Hexa’ isn’t strictly electronic, by any means, but it’s not post-rock either.
Sun 13 (UK):
Cleared’s sixth long-player and third for Touch, Hexa, finds the duo opening new doors that lead to untrodden recesses. In Vallera’s case, it’s his second release in consecutive months, the first being Maar – his collaboration alongside Joseph Clayton Mills which birthed the LP, Airelocks – one of the finest experimental endeavours committed to tape this year.
And Hexa is every bit as thought-provoking. Constructed firstly with Hess’ recorded sessions in the group’s practice space, he then handed the work over to Vallera, who added his own recordings. The amalgamation forms a series of obscure collages that manipulate sound design into something that thaws out the coldness that it can sometimes offer.
While there’s a dark thread that runs through these recordings, the difference here is that Cleared temper it with a sense of hope. Take the eponymous opening track; sonics that are like a recurring cold echo from an abandoned warehouse floor. Magnet Bloom follows a similar trajectory, however there’s more space to manoeuvre; the composition unfurling like a spectre drifting from the same warehouse in search on new liminal space.
Cleared - HexaMeanwhile, Time In Return sees Hess and Vallera exploring minimalism to great effect, with a series of soft drones that sooth the deepest parts of the mind. The production, so pure and transparent that takes flight towards the outer regions.
It’s a contrast to 53S – an interlude of the blurred noise of a train station, captured by field recordist Chris Watson. Hessand Vallera adopt a maximalist approach to his findings, with a series of acerbic sonics which splits Hexa straight down the middle like an axe to firewood.
Visual Space: In Conversation with Luggage’s Michael Vallera
Then there’s aptly titled Sunsickness. Reaching for the underbelly of drone where Mark Nelson has inhabited for the last three decades, it’s here where Cleared reshape these brooding soundscapes with dark washes of sound that’s like thick smoke coursing through a tunnel. And while the title of the following track may suggest something similar, Ash is a pulsating rush at altitude. A piece that builds majestically with warm drones that reach a crescendo in the clouds. Again, it’s that hope on the back of despair that sees Cleared like never before.
In many ways, Oval Waters is the perfect closing track. As incongruous as its title suggests, with a series of warped dreamscapes, it sounds like it’s been reversed engineered. It’s this effect that is essentially the embodiment of sound exploration as we know it.
This is why Hexa is another important piece of work in the Cleared memorandum. Hess and Vallera explore the progression of technology and its relationship to industry. Many of these soundscapes, a response to the blue-collar DNA of the duo’s native Chicago, which sees the pair tackling locality from a different angle than most. Through contrasting tones and emotions, the pair conjure up the kind of juxtapositions that are indicative of everyday life. And it’s this that makes Hexa all the more relevant. [Simon Kirk]
Ambientlog (NL):
Cleared is the Chicago-based duo of Steven Hess and Michael Vallera. Hess is a percussionist and Vallera a guitarist – but that’s not something you’d directly guess when listening to Cleared. Both work in various settings as well as as solo artists, but as Cleared the duo has released albums since 2011. Hexa is their sixth album, and the third on the Touch label.
Although both artists are based in Chicago, Hexa is the result of a ‘classic’ collaboration – with Hess sending his recorded sessions to Vallera to further add and manipulate them. In the process, almost all of the references to the original instruments are lost and morphed into new sounds.
Some of the tracks are based on drones, but there are also deep pulsations and heavily dubbed rhythmic patterns. The short intermission-like track 53S, on the other hand, is built from a field recording from a train station that was recorded by Chris Watson (I assume you remember his masterpiece El Tren Fantasma?).
There is a lot to be explored on this album. All tracks are full of details but at the same time have a nice ‘gritty’ sound (as in ‘not too over-produced’ – although I realize that it takes a lot of production skills to create this sound).
These almost industrial soundscapes may be a bit too intense to be called ‘ambient music’ in the classic definition. So: “if you need to identify a genre locale, put Hexa on the side of the street where current electronic music lives”. [Peter]
Magnet (USA):
Cleared is a Chicago duo with fixed personnel but a morphing modus operandi. When Michael Vallera and Steven Hess started out in 2009, their music explored a spectrum between stripped-down rock structures and spread-out expositions of texture. But both of these guys have other places to rock; to name just two among several, Vallera fronts the band Luggage and Hess keeps the beat in Locrian. On Hexa, their third longplayer for Touch, the aesthetic compass that once pointed back and forth between poles now rotates spherically, creating a multidimensional space with a throbbing dub heartbeat.
While many of the album’s sounds were originally performed on guitar and drums in the duo’s practice room, nary a riff or note made it to the finished work. Instead, Vallera used those recordings as raw material. The duo’s played sounds have been broken down at the molecular level, recombined and built back up again to create pieces that are as layered as they are expansive. Take a walk in their fields of resonance, and the ground invariably disintegrates. But instead of falling in, you drift slowly through layers of exploded sound. Bass reports puff up like cumulous clouds, and string and metal resonance flex and flow like air currents. The closer you listen, the more you’re drawn into an expanse that seems boundaryless. [Bill Meyer]