CLEARED

TO:126 Cleared – ‘Hexa’

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 - Hexa

Meanwhile, 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]

TO:119 CLEARED – ‘Of Endless Light’

CD – 6 tracks – 72:21

Release date: Friday 23rd September 2022

Track listing:

1. First Sleep
2. Of Endless Light
3. Dawn
4. Pulse
5. Blue Drift
6. Walking Field

Now available to order on Bandcamp

Photography & design by Jon Wozencroft
Mastered by Denis Blackham
Recorded by Jeremy Lemos

Cleared is the longstanding project of Steven Hess and Michael Vallera, based in Chicago, Illinois. Of Endless Light was recorded by Jeremy Lemos at Electrical Audio in Chicago and mastered by Denis Blackham. The six tracks complete the longest release to date by the duo, who were resolute in utilising the maximum time available on the compact disc format. Cleared has produced a series of critically recognised recordings since its self-titled debut in 2011. Working with the Touch label on The Key (recorded in spring 2019, released in October 2020) was a leap forward, prompting remixed tracks by Philp Jeck, Fennesz, Bethan Kellough, and Olivia Block.

Of Endless Light is noctambulant, a walk through formal sonic spaces and colours beginning with the cascading, bell-like tones of the opening track, ‘First Sleep.’ The husks of a city’s industrial past are summoned: warehouses hollowed out for condominiums, dust-covered factory floors, a distant grind of machining, clouds of metallic particles, and the persistent background hum of traffic. These remnants contrast with hints of the sterile present of a city no less cruel than its industrial past. ‘Dawn’ opens with a grey drone and scattered electronic rhythms as wiring, and extended guitar lines suggest the opening of another cycle of the day into evening. ‘Pulse’ offers a hypnotic pattern that suggests the movement of people through the city’s core, slowly overlain with cymbals evoking the shimmer of sunlight cleaving off the windows of distant buildings. The album appropriately concludes with ‘Walking Field,’ methodically moving forward via a cloud of meditative clicks and looping melodies.

Of Endless Light is a patient listen, distilled into a sonic environment specific to Hess and Vallera’s lens. Cleared created its crepuscular moods using the core methodology of their previous records while expanding their music’s range, artistry, and subtlety. Deploying careful instrumentation, sampling, and mixing to experiment with tone and atmosphere, Of Endless Light breathes and drifts through layers of sound that veil, reveal, and intrigue. The result gives a listener much to discover, examine, experience, and consider – as well as the incentive to return again and again. [Bruce Adams, 2022]

Reviews:

Electronic Sound (UK):

The latest album from Steven Hess and Michael Vallera exists in the darkened shadows of their Chicago base. An exercise in maximalist duration but easily missed minimalist detail, Of Endless Light requires extreme volume to be fully appreciated. When heard this way, the otherwise quiet, grainy textures of the 18-minute opening track ‘First Sleep’ reveals an ever-shifting landscape of low, fluttering rumbles, overlapping metallic drone splinters, elegiac tones and deeply submerged rhythms. Dramatic, exquisitely layered and hugely absorbing. [Mat Smith]

The New Noise (Italy):

La prima cosa da sapere è che amano i minutaggi lunghi e gli elementi che si aggiungono con cadenza organica. La seconda è che, per i tempi attuali e l’ambito di ricerca, è una discografia alquanto contenuta quella dei Cleared di Chicago, duo composto da Steven Hess (lo si conosce bene da queste parti per il suo operato coi Locrian) e Michael Vallera. Poche uscite ma profilo qualitativo alto e ‘sorvegliato’ sotto tutti gli aspetti. In altre parole: si sente che è gente a cui le cose piace farle bene. Non so se The Key, il disco precedente, sempre su Touch, abbia dato loro una visibilità maggiore per via del prestigio del marchio. Ma quel che è certo è che va recuperato, sia per il mood che lo lega a questo in esame, sia per la sua particolarità. Sì, perché è una specie di doppio album: alle quattro composizioni autografe del duo seguono gli stessi pezzi remixati da Philip Jeck, Christian Fennesz, Bethan Kellough, Olivia Block. Tutta gente perfettamente sulla loro linea di tiro. Che fa emergere, ognuno con la sua sensibilità e portato d’esperienza, aspetti magari nascosti negli originali o nuovi sistemi di relazione tra gli elementi in gioco. Una radiografia intima affidata agli amici e allo stesso tempo una patente d’appartenenza. Ma addentriamoci in questo nuovo Cleared. Flussi di velluto in solitudine appartata che sembrano dirci di un tempo smangiato ai bordi dal suo procedere orizzontale (‘First Sleep’); tenue linea di galleggiamento ritmico e correnti ascensionali con squarci d’emotività che crepitano (Of Endless Light); partenza drone severa che cambia gradualmente di segno attraverso l’immissione di elementi morbidi (‘Dawn’); fondali oleosi da elettronica riduzionista e pulsazioni dub fantasmatiche per una cosa vicina nello spirito alle destrutturazioni languide di un Pinkcourtesyphone (‘Pulse’); tintinnii di campane che farebbero felice il David Shea dell’ultimo disco su Room40 (‘Blue Drift’); cartolina dei saluti dove i colori sembrano prendere vita dopo tanti banchi di nebbia (‘Walking Field’). È inutile girarci intorno o sforzarsi di aggiungere altro: tra quanti trafficano in quella terra di mezzo dove deep drones, minimalismo, estetica Kranky si compenetrano, Hess e Vallera sono i più bravi e preparati. Scommettiamo che vedremo comparire questo disco in molte playlist di fine anno? [Loris Zecchin]

Otis Nugatory:

How can music be so wordless yet say so much? Evocative-grinding; spatial-condensed; drone-journeyscapes. Distant cousin of of Coils’ ‘How to Destroy Angels.’ Thanks to Bruce from Kranky for recommending; going on my Best of 2022 since no album has so aptly captured our world and its limping around the sun. Joins Touch pantheons like Fennesz and Biosphere.

Lost Tribe Sound

Absolutely love that Cleared continues to refine their snail-paced, ever-steady rhythmic mechanism. Of Endless Light is a masterpiece! My love for long-form thump and drone music has rarely felt this satisfied. It’s a sound pleasing enough for the ambient-lite folks, while leaving enough sonic grit and gristle for the fringe types. Highest recommendation!

Gonzo Karaoke:

It may seem counterintuitive, but the closer music approximates to silence, the more forceful its likely impact. It’s a fact plainly not lost on Chicago-based duo Cleared whose breathtaking new album is the turbid, thrice-distilled essence of quietude, an inchoate foam of dimensionless un-sound that enters via the pores rather than the auditory canal. At a considerable stretch, one COULD argue Of Endless Light falls within the parameters of dub techno, but only by implication, its signature rhythm-centric sparsity smeared and splayed to the very brink of breakdown. Proceedings commence with the ultra-refracted blur of ‘First Sleep’ which crests the horizon like a gust of smog across moonlit moorland. Fragments of wounded melody bleed through the blanketing static until decomposition inevitably sets in and the track slowly expires to a mo(u)rning chorus of axes being sharpened on a distant grindstone. By contrast, ‘Pulse’, ‘Dawn’ and ‘Waking Field’ are gorgeously eroded simulacra of Chain Reaction-esque avant-minimalism, dance music passed through a fine-mesh sieve to remove almost every joule of kinetic energy. Kick drums – or rather the muted metronomic clicks that pass for them – are so subsumed by grainy swathes of ambience, they barely register as rhythm. The album’s piéce de rèsistance though is the stunning ‘Blue Drift’, a darkening pall of drone and reverberant carillon bells that rivals Sarah Davachi’s ‘Hall Of Mirrors’ for stentorian solemnity. Step inside; the silence is DEAFENING. [Jordan F. Talbot]

TouchLine 10 CLEARED – ‘Breathing Ring’

Video single – 1 track – 7:23

Track listing:

1. Breathing Ring

Now available on Bandcamp

All sound by Steven Hess & Michael Vallera
Recorded by Greg Norman
Arranged and mixed by Michael Vallera
Mastered by Matthew Barnhart, December 2020
Published by Touch Music/Fairwood Music UK Ltd.

TO:116 Cleared – ‘The Key’

8 tracks – CD + DL – 1:12:24

Available on Bandcamp to pre-order soon
Release date: 30th October 2020

Track listing:

CLEARED
1. The Key 10:51 – you can hear this track here
2. Bonded 7:11
3. Of Air 12:56
4. Mesa 10:32

5. Philip Jeck – The Key 10:46
6. Fennesz – Bonded 6:28
7. Bethan Kellough – Of Air 6:52
8. Olivia Block – Mesa 6:48

Cleared is the Chicago-based duo of Steven Hess and Michael Vallera, formed in the latter part of 2009 as a project to focus on repetition and patience as central elements of composition. Hess and Vallera have previously worked in various contexts of improvisational, long form and experimental music (Hess contributed to Fennesz’s Seven Stars, released on Touch in 2011). Cleared is an effort to take the knowledge both have gained from these arenas in order to build hypnotic patterns of sound and rhythm.

‘The Key’ was recorded in the spring of 2019 at Electrical Audio in Chicago Illinois with engineer Greg Norman. After a silence of several years, Cleared went into the studio with a set of drawings and notes describing the arcs of various systems for the creation of soundscapes and rhythmic patterns. There was no rehearsal, demo recordings or any other preparation besides theses diagrams which were designed by both Hess and Vallera in tandem. The logic behind this strategy was to erase the confines of previous releases and return to the origin of the project, which simply began as an open improvisation between the two musicians, centering a focus on slow, gradual changes and a meditative sensibility.

The recordings were made with a specific attention to sonic detail and fidelity, resulting in hours of material that was arranged and mixed over the next year by Michael Vallera in his home studio.

The resulting four tracks were further investigated and reimagined by Philip Jeck, Christian Fennesz, Bethan Kellough and Olivia Block, adding another form of ‘The Key’ as a collection of discreet and weighted sonic explorations.

Reviews:

The Chicago Reader:

Recording studios have reputations, and Chicago’s Electrical Audio is well-known as the place to go if you want to capture how your band really sounds. But when Michael Vallera and Steven Hess of local duo Cleared entered that establishment in spring 2019, they were in the early phase of a transformation. Their first four albums had navigated a linear path through stark rock structures and synthetic sounds, informed by the way those elements sounded in concert. But for their fifth, The Key, they started not with tunes but with written diagrams, which the two of them used to guide a series of studio improvisations. Vallera then took the raw recordings back home and spent a year extracting a finished album out of that material. During that process he not only filtered out anything that sounded like a riff or a melody but also layered and amplified individual elements until they became discrete musical entities.

‘Bonded’ disassembles the component sounds of a drum kit and scatters them across a couple of looped guitar notes that appear and reappear like the lights of passing cars flickering across a bedroom ceiling. And the 13-minute ‘Of Air’ consists mostly of guitar resonance and a few low drumbeats stirred into field recordings of a thunderstorm. Once the work was complete, Cleared commissioned remixes of each of the album’s four tracks from Fennesz, Philip Jeck, Bethan Kellough (three of their labelmates on Touch), and fellow Chicagoan Olivia Block. Some of these collaborators turned Cleared’s music into mirror images of their own, while others created crystallized reductions of it – but all of them continued the process of unlocking sounds and tinkering with them at an atomic level. [Bill Meyer]

Blow Up (Italy)