Facta - Blush (Wisdom Teeth)

WHAT THE COVER LOOKS LIKE:

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WHAT WE SAY:

With dance music neither in demand or even making much sense the last year, this happy middle ground of ambient enriched New Age vibes & toned down club constructs from Facta for his Wisdom Teeth label teases the prospect of dancing to music again, whilst providing a gently propulsive soundtrack to incremental freedom & life's new norms.

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WHAT YOUR EARS SAY:

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WHAT THE RELEASE NOTES SAY:

London-based record label Wisdom Teeth kicks off 2021 with something close to home: Blush - the playful, dynamic debut LP by label co-founder, Facta.

Recorded unusually quickly over a short stint in early 2020, the record is the product of a period of refreshed and unfussy creativity. It’s an innovative and distinctly contemporary album that moves a good few steps beyond the artist’s work to date - loosely rooted in UK dance music but taking added influence from ambient, modern classical, dreampop, Balearic, folk music and beyond. The result is a lush, ornate record populated by aqueous pads, bleeping arps, wandering melodies and sparse broken rhythms; acoustic instruments that play out alongside FM synths, all processed with a pristine UV sheen inherited from modern pop music.

The record opens with ‘Sistine (Plucks)’ - a crystalline synth piece with a stumbling, shifting metre revolving around an odd-ended MIDI harp loop, coloured through with washed-out pads and snatches of found sound. This breezy mood follows through to ‘On Deck’, where an FM vibraphone rings out on top of woozy, warping chords and a subby soca groove.

Moving forward the record moves cohesively through a range of shifting moods and hues. The machine jazz of ‘Brushes’ is tense and coiled, with nods towards Burnt Friedman, Photek and Eli Keszler. ‘Iso Stream’ sees a rich, colourful sprawl of arpeggiated synths and dissociated vocal chops unspool slowly to form pooling, lowlit melodies. Title track ‘Blush’ is a forlorn Autonomic love song built from clicks-n-cuts - like dBridge & Instra:mental reduced and reinterpreted by SND. Throughout, bold, broad melodies take centre stage, and the tracks build like compositions rather than loops or club tools. There are echoes of the dancefloor - particularly in the slo-mo bruk of ‘Verge’ and the glacial subs underpinning ‘Diving Birds’ (a collaboration with friend and Trilogy Tapes regular Parris) - however the end results find us somewhere far off.

‘Blush’ is the second long-form release to come from Wisdom Teeth following K-LONE’s 2020 debut album, ‘Cape Cira’, which was widely ranked as one the best electronic LPs of 2020. 

Credits
Written and produced by Oscar Henson.
Artwork by Roz Edenbrow.
Design and layout by Guillaume de Ubéda.
Mastered by Beau at Ten Eight Seven.
Distributed by Cargo.