About this item

The Preservation label presents Grandfather Harmonic, the new full-length album from Sparkling Wide Pressure. The alter ego of Murfreesboro, Tennessee's Frank Baugh, Sparkling Wide Pressure has drawn from a seemingly infinite well of sonic inspiration to record at an incredible rate since 2008, having his work appear on labels such as Digitalis, Stunned, Housecraft and Students of Decay.

This transfixing entry into his weighty catalogue pinpoints Baugh's increasing fascination with song forms couched within abstract spaces. These mesmeric pieces revolve on a constant teetering between melody and abrasion, sharing kinship with classic post-punk primitivism as much as today's field of synth-wielding trance phasers.

Through layered synth tones that uncoil like long, clear breaths and hypnotic percussion, pivotal to the essence of Sparkling Wide Pressure is Baugh's rangy guitar playing. Baugh can execute walls of enveloping ambience to encompass soft, gentle ruminations laced with smoky mood and subterfuge or take a more urgent tone, forging an otherworldly pulse that never loses the visceral thrill and pull that proves the magnetic core of this work.

Thematically, Grandfather Harmonic revolves around Baugh's connection to his childhood home deep in the woods of in rural Tennessee and memories of his grandfather, specifically the rich tones of the harmonica he once played. In its own curious, searching way, Grandfather Harmonic is a remembrance of place and time from a truly atypical imagination..

Grandfather Harmonic is the second work in Preservation's limited edition CD series Preservation called Circa for 2012. Only 300 copies of each release in the series will be available and will feature a design by Mark Gowing. Each design is realised using an abstract alphabet that creates an interlocking grid, determined by artist and volume number for something both fixed and random.

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