Release date: 27th September 2024
Available to pre-order 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.
