Eaux proudly announces the second full length LP from Rrose, Please Touch, released on vinyl, CD, and digital download. The LP follows 2019's Hymn to Moisture in ways that are both subtle and striking: Please Touch further hones the artist's tensile sound while exploring new aesthetic vistas and basking in an undeniably erotic sense of play. Moving with undulating power, the album's nine tracks drift across tempos from a weightless 0 bpm to a crawling 100 to a lunging 140 and back, with a rich palette of sculpted noise and cross-talking microtones.

Rrose's compositional process, rooted in their studies with West Coast avant garde trailblazers at Mills College, centers on "seed" sounds being fed through elaborate webs of interrelated audio processing. The result is a world where changes in any one element have downstream implications for some or all the others. It's a rich interdependence that lets the tracks breathe, grow and mutate with uncanny organicism. Please Touch addresses in equal measure the perceptual and the corporeal: these are sounds that sink into the body, exhibiting a tactility that pushes, pulls, bends and yields with fearsome vibrancy.

The album splits its time between radical techno iterations and pieces which pare back the percussion, letting the synth textures uncurl in their own time and space. The quivering drone and rolling sub-bass of "Joy of the Worm'' set the tone for the record, while "Rib Cage," Spore" and "Spines " swing with stepping rhythmic underpinnings. Building with finely calibrated tension, they use their few elements to startling, snarling effect. "Pleasure Vessels" is a rare moment of becalmed introspection in Rrose's oeuvre, hinting at a melodic ambiance that is practically unseen in previous works. It glows with a soft, dawn-like light before dissolving into a tidal fizz. "The Illuminating Glass'' brings the tempo down to a languorous chug, nodding its way through a field of glistening chirps and leaden gasps. "Feeding Time," "Disappear" and album closer "Turning Blue'' meanwhile nod to the cerebral psychedelia of Rrose's forebears, with mesmeric, looping textures and long, magisterial tones not dissimilar to the spectral works of James Tenney (whose work Rrose regularly performs) and the deep listening pieces of Pauline Oliveros.

The title of the album refers playfully to the tactile quality of the music while hinting at a forbidden sensuality that is only permitted within the confines of this microcosm. The phrase is also another nod to Marcel Duchamp, who gave this title to a 1947 exhibition of Surrealist art. Across the nine tracks, Rrose follows the lead of the sound(s) rather than trying to impose on the flow of the sonic material. Each move changes the parameters of a track's evolution. Thus, a non-hierarchical, symbiotic relationship forms between the so-called "music-maker" and the music itself. Please Touch acts as a collection of limbs, organs, parasites, and growths which both devour each other and keep each other alive.

TRACK LISTING

1. Joy Of The Worm
2. Rib Cage
3. Pleasure Vessels
4. Spore
5. Feeding Time
6. Spines
7. Disappeared
8. The Illuminating Glass
9. Turning Blue

“London electronica trio Eaux sound like Fuck Buttons on a comedown: all glacially moving synths and snowdrift vocals.” Q – '5 Songs You Must Hear'

When Ben Crook - one third of spectral electronic trio Eaux - describes his group's songs as "never finished, just abandoned" he's describing a creative process that burrows its way down and down until each track has to be wrenched away from their originator's hands, given the sheer amount of avenues that the three-piece manage to open up during conception. However Eaux's debut LP Plastics, out on ATP Recordings, also has the feel of abandonment to it, in the sense that to listen to it is to come across some long-lost gem, an unknown discovery amidst a box of records, an electronic album where influences past and present cancel each other out in stasis to create an album that exists in a timeless era.

Formed in London in early 2012, Crook, alongside Sian Ahern and Stephen Warrington, centre their foreboding towers of shadowed sound around the hypnotic release and repetition of techno; however, although Plastics does display minimalist tendencies, the group never allow their rhythmic patterns to become static, a heavily analogue approach to everything they do putting a very human face to this machine-made music.

Much of Plastics has evolved from live jams, the group holing themselves up in a personal rehearsal and studio space so that ideas form and bounce off each other. Having all come from more orthodox band set-ups, they found a freedom in experimenting with comparatively unfamiliar electronic technology, their limited knowledge of their tools meaning they could approach them with very little baggage. Ahern's vocal is another key element to the group's sound, offering a softer-edged, higher range than much of the simmering murmurs and oscillations rising and falling below her. Though aerial, sweeping through the likes of the Broadcast-esque ‘Movers and Shakers' and flowering above the pulsating after-dark drone disco of ‘Peace Makes Plenty', her voice largely works as another layer amidst what's a darkened but rich tapestry, an ethos of equality driving the group, all roles on a level with each other.

So it is that Eaux's music feels like it's trying to reach out from that clutter and acceleration of technology, tracks like ‘Evoke' pushing hard to find space away from their synthetic frequencies. Plastics, like its name suggests, is a collection of moulded, shaped forms; the result of collective electrical process. It's an album that takes in the bigger picture, with each component unable to do without any of the others.

TRACK LISTING

1. Head
2. Movers And Shakers
3. Pressure Points
4. Peace Makes Plenty
5. Sleeper
6. The Light Falls Through Itself
7. Blue Tunnel
8. Evoke
9. Zero Zero (CD Only – And On The Download That Comes With LP)

Over 23 minutes of fresh music by Nick Grey and English guitarist Nicholas Davis. 'Silvery guitar lines, distant drum poundings, warm vocals and chords meandering like a milky stream floating on the bed of the moon.' "Les Eaux Territoriales" is the first volume of Nick's mini-series "Unclear Perspectives"; each volume of the series will be centered around one or several specific instruments and will revolve around its own original musical axis and its own set of collaborators. Nick Grey is a member of the collective 48 Cameras, (which have collaborated with prestigious artists such as Charlemagne Palestine, Gerard Malanga, Michael Gira or Paul Buck), and his other projects include a new full length album named "Thieves Among Thorns" (out on Hand/eye early 2006) and a yet-unsigned EP. Nicholas Davis is a talented improv guitarist from the UK, and Nick's full-time collaborator. This is highly recommended, warm and delicately beautiful music.