26 Fascinating Records I Heard in 2017

Bvdub “Epilogues for the End of the Sky”

Xander Harris “Termination Dust”

Earthen Sea “An Act of Love”

Hiro Kone “Love is the Capital”

Patricia “Several Shades of the Same Color”

Gas “Narkopop”

Destroyer “Ken”

Phew “Light Sleep”

Moon Duo “Occult Architecture, Vol. 1”

Nite Jewel “Real High”

The War on Drugs “A Deeper Understanding”

Peaking Lights “The Fifth State of Consciousness”

Justin Walter “Unseen Forces”

TOPS “Sugar at the Gate”

Demen “Nektyr”

Pharaohs “In Oeland”

Kleistwahr “Music For the Zeitgeist Fighters”

Bvdub “Heartless”

William Basinski “A Shadow in Time”

Constantine “Hades”

Pharmakon “Contact”

The Caretaker “Everywhere at the End of Time”

Federico Durand “La Nina Junco”

Cafe Ale “Transformative Nature”

Chuck Johnson “Balsams”

Uniform “Wake in Fright”

Persistentmidnight 2017

My Persistentmidnight productions for the year. All music/production/art by me. A lot of people came to visit my corner of the multiverse this year. Hopefully next year they will return, and a lot more will come along too. Special thanks to Stickfigure, Wool-e-Tapes, Rachel, Curtis, John, Travis, Jaye, Lake, and Chris.

Warning Light "Cosmic Mediation EP"
High Marks "Steel Grieves" (Wool-e-Tapes)
Seeing the Sights "Mojave Sunsets LP"
Outer Gods "Severed Together"
Clone Operators "Melting Back the Foil EP"
Lake Lander "PRE EMBRYONIC SOUNDS"
Warning Light "At the End of the Road" (Stickfigure)
High Marks "Systems Emerge Obsolete. EP"
Warning Light "Luxury Through Repetition" / beat tape

Luxury Through Repetition LP mixes

PM040: Warning Light "Luxury Through Repetition" also up as individual mixes, a different listening experience from the beat tape. Pressed as a limited CD.

tracklist:

A 

The Mystery Letter Further Glance the Sphere Casting Tiny Sparks ParcParque B Airlock Island Placer Permanently Out to Sea She's Gone Liquid 

that beat tape can be viewed/heard here  youtu.be/iIDfy7jK2DE

Luxury Through Repetition beat tape

These past six months, I've been listening to a lot of beat tapes on YouTube, and tho I've cycled through several genres of tapes, I've never found one that really does anything quite like what I do. So after some experimenting and dubbing, I found myself with a raucous collection of things roughly approaching psychedelic motorik electro, which I then assembled into a full 34 min beat tape for YouTube. I may do LP mixes of these tracks at some point, but for now, here they are in one full tape.

At the End of the Road, out for all to hear/see/experience

At the End of the Road has seen it's physical debut in the past week, and I couldn't be prouder of it as an album. It's a long, lonely, wistful album, a double LP length meditation on how and why life changes the way it does, and how endings can lead to new things. I pushed myself hard to make an experimental and immersive ambient album, and with a little help from several compatriots it came together nicely. This project grew out of a very fertile period for me, but I'm lucky I even finished this album. In the three years it took to record, there were certainly several months in there where nothing was accomplished. For a few weeks this summer it felt like I may just need to drop the project, but somehow, I kept a clear head (*meditation*is*everything*) and finished everything. After some stops and starts in the mixdown process, I mastered the album on a hastily assembled mobile station in a rental condo over the course of just one particularly hot week in Hilton Head, South Carolina.

Many thanks to Stickfigure for pressing the compact disc version, I spent a lot of time working on an art aesthetic that matched the sound so it was a real thrill to hold this album in my hands finally. And many thanks to the two best.

And now, as they say, on to the next adventure.

sincerely, DH

Gloworming Through the Southern Skies debut

The next song out for preview from At the End of the Road is "Gloworming Through the Southern Skies," and it features Rachel M from Snowbride on synths / electronics. The album doesn't come out until the end of October, but I'm excited to have a couple pieces of it up for people to hear. Enjoy.

Little Hearts, Big (Interludes) debut

hey All! The first song selection from At the End of the Road is up for your preview/enjoyment on Stickfigure's soundcloud; I'm very excited for this album to be out in the world soon.

This song specifically started as a live interlude I used between other pieces, but it eventually took on a life of it's own. The fifth song on At the End of the Road, it's not quite the halfway point of this sprawling hour and seventeen minute album.

KnifePlay mix!

Here is a mix I recently made for the LA site KnifePlay! It's got a pretty wide range of stuff, but it def illustrates where my head has been at this summer musically and was a ton of fun to put together. I also did an interview for the site, it should be up in the near future. Many thanks to KnifePlay for making all of this happen.

At the End of the Road announcement

My next album will be At the End of the Road,

coming out 8.27.17 on Stickfigure Recordings on CD and digital.

This was a pretty epic project by any standard (PM recorded/mastered/designed album art all in-house), but this album feels like a beautifully mad science experiment that is actually going to see the light of day... and not all the experiments do. This record is full of collaborators and a dense amount of field recordings/tape looping experiments, but still offers some techno-leaning beatwork and uptempo sample manipulation. At the End of the Road started as an attempt to look back on my ten years of DIY record making and to synthesize it all into one experience (that's probably an impossible task). It ended up with a beautiful inner life of its own... a reminder that at the end of every road, there is another path.

PM Production Lake Lander PRE EMBRYONIC SOUND

Lake Lander's PRE EMBRYONIC SOUND is a pretty classic case of me starting with the seed of an idea (an EP that flows continuously, woven together by a 36 minute sound collage) and finding someone else who put a totally new spin on it. Through months of emailing back and forth, together we deconstructed (in our respective Roland samplers), then rebuilt the individual tracks on PRE EMBRYONIC SOUND and mixed everything down to tape. This is a murky, hazy record with an odd flavor of its own in comparison with other PM productions. I ended up taking a very light hand with the production/mastering on my end; the material just had a life of its own that way. 

A shout out to Rachel M from Snowbride on the original cover photo, it ended up being the perfect expression of the music and concepts. 

PM production: Clone Operators "Melting Back the Foil"

PM037: an experimental release that uses raw analogue electronics to create a noisy amalgam of industrial techno sounds in a spare, post-punk influenced production

PM production: Severed Together

Severed Together is Outer Gods' fifth album, a production that unquestionably pushed me past my limits in engineering and recording in general. I'm glad this all came to fruition, as most of the material came together due to the duo's live soundtracks, there were a series of cut-up and splicing techniques used to forge shorter songs. Somehow I think of this as the most "organic" Outer Gods album, though that term seems relative in light of all the synthesizer and treated electric organ work on this album. John from Bataille came to work on the sessions with his typically open mind about things, which always makes for a pleasant recording experience. 

PersistentMidnight Mix: Distant Shores

I made this :)

Severed Together

Outer Gods' upcoming album Severed Together. John L Hannah (Bataille, Classic Cult Grotesque) and I co-produced this album, I'm quite happy about the sounds contained herein. CDs out on Stickfigure Recordings at the end of the month.

blast from the path

from the archives, this is the original Moon Peoples EP I made with Melissa Lonely as a duo about ten years ago. it is def improvised noise, though certainly on a more ambient side of it all. 

Cosmic Mediation EP

Persistentmidnight035: "Cosmic Mediation EP" a couple long form, deep listening tracks I've been constructing recently. The bonus track A Wraith at the County Steppes is the soundtrack to the short film The Wraith by Silent Frame Films.

D Haddon "Night Flight EP"

This collects some of my earliest recordings, some dating as far back as 2004, all of which originally came out on my old label Sleepaway Recordings. I've put them together for people curious about the origins of this project when I was just making DIY home recordings in my Asheville apartment.

Something random

this is probably going to be on a PM Comp that's coming out this year /

PM Mix: Distant Shores

NEUUU Mix up from Persistentmidnight! Here is an hour of ambient / jazz / pop to fuel your adventures to distant shores.

Productions 016, part four Light and Dark

Sometimes writing about Warning Light feels a little odd to me. I do so many things on the projects that sometimes it is hard to add that into the mix too. But it never hurts to assess, and Warning Light serves as a nexus of sorts for a lot of the Persistentmidnight work.

The Life/Death Suite came to me because I had wanted very badly to have a long epic piece at the end of Oftenchance originally. I wrote a lot, and the elements that became "Often Chance" and "Dream Lovers Never Dream Alone" bounced around several tracks before I figured out how to weave it together as a suite. I'll fully admit here "Dream Lovers Never Dream Alone" came to me in the form it exists here partially as a dream; I dreamt Roy Orbison was having a couple songs produced by Coil. So upon waking and wondering just what that would be, I sat down to mix the song again and this came out. I approached this EP to experiment with ways to kaleidoscope things together. It is meant to mimic the arc of a person's life as a listening experience, and then as a cassette tape, loop back on itself to play again (like LIFE itself :)-).



Of course, Inland Empires Disregard the Sea was a totally different beast. I spent a lot of time stream lining the material, being pretty ruthless about cutting parts actually, but I felt like the spirit of the project was pretty immediate. I started this album right after finishing Oftenchance and in some senses it is the full refinement of that experience. It was a very difficult production at times because I always wanted to add more, but I knew I had to keep it as "lean and hungry" as I could. At least, while still being true to the sprawling nature of the project in general. Inland Empires is a record about Perspective, and the relativity of one's own perspective in a myriad of others. But why it ended up being about that didn't become apparent to me until well after it was complete. I had several goals going into the production too, the primary goal was to shoot for a palette that utilized dub and krautrock textures while keeping firm dance and electronic roots. There was more "life" in this album than previous outings, the live percussion and field recordings of places put a lot of grit into a record that could have just been Ableton-Robot music. My ambient pieces on here ("Errants of Lost Youth" and "This Room Will Never Be the Same") are without a doubt some of my favorites, the beat work brings something entirely different to them. "Lumen Tracker" was the track that definitely came the easiest, "Darling Heart Gives Me Vertigo" certainly went through a lot of versions. This was the first time I made "single edits" for an album and it was a very challenging experience. I'm very pleased with how this album turned out, I somehow managed to cover all the aspects (and in just under an hour no less). Side note- I am especially proud of the album art on this one, the CD layout is among my favorites of anything I have designed.


Producing a single right at the end of the year was not my original intention! But honestly, I was stuck in a hotel in Raleigh, North Carolina alone, and I got to thinking about friends I have who I had had conversations with about how they weren't seeing some important person for Christmas this year. It was a somber thought, being alone myself, so I tried to write through my feelings so to speak. I managed to come up with a couple nice pieces, though they are perhaps a little more spacious and lo-fi than my work on Inland Empires had been. Sometimes you need to do something spur of the moment as an artist, and this is good proof of that. Rachel provided a really great photo for the album cover, I was honored to use it.

Productions016, part three DARKBEATS

downers. came to an end last year with our best album (my opinion, I'm def biased). Ether Noir manages to be a total expansion of the high points of our more song oriented material on Low Informant. SIMNs tape effects mutate things in very subtle interesting ways throughout, his free form way of working always brought new things to the record. There's dark dance material on here coexisting with blaring industrial noise. This album stays true to the original context of it as a noise project, but pushed itself incorporate newer things like techno and Hyperdub electronic sounds. It's a dark and chaotic album, it manages to sample Madonna on "Crawl to Creep" before tumbling into an eight plus minute ambient tape loop on the next track. I'm proud of it, tremendously.



Clone Operators is noisy, analog leaning techno, made from live jams I started doing with my rhythm wolf drum machine in the studio. I lean about as heavily on my Trogotronics 666 as the wolf, and there's definitely still some Electribe influence here as well. Something about this project feels very punk to me, perhaps in the just "live angry jams" type sense at least. This is def the most aggressive project I have worked on in quite a while. But live demos can be rejuvenating as a recording engineer, and doing something in a new way can be very helpful.

Productions 016, part two Cosmic Tides

Seeing the Sights has been an off and on again project I have worked on since the days just after Roman Photos ending. My friend Jaye, who I knew from the UNCA music department, sent me some synthesizer recordings she had been dabbling with after giving up the violin. After a couple emails, we decided to start a spacey synthesizer duo, and we began to trade tapes. After a few years making recordings as a duo, we also started to bring in friends on the occasional track. So this album features some great percussion and noise guitar additions. Between Avalon & Harbour was definitely us stretching our wings to fly as a production duo. Our earlier albums had been lo-fi and self consciously minimal, this new album felt more like an epic post-rock production. Jaye kept referring to it as a shoegaze album, there's probably some truth in that.



Distant Hymns is a Seeing the Sights side project with just me and Jaye working on a pure aesthetic: synthesizers and effects recorded on tapes, then those tapes edited in crazy ways in our home studios. This album is filled with so many cascading synth textures and heavy tape drones. Living far away, we decided to email our tape recordings back and forth, layering as we went. In some ways it's similar to the first two Seeing the Sights albums when it was just Jaye and I, but really, this is probably a big maturation of that as a sound and idea. There are so many wide open spaces in this production. The amount of layers we did on this was pretty off the wall, but it truly is a space album in every sense of that word. Jaye also reduxed an old Warning Light track through her absurd tape setup and it came out great. THE EPIC EVERDAY COULD BE EVERY DAY.



Snowbride's follow up to Fateful 808s finally came together last summer, it was a great thing to be able to round out our Southern Trilogy. Small Town Synthetics really swirls together all the sounds we dabbled with in our initial big bang as a band, we actually finished several older tracks in the completion. Production-wise we were attempting a fairly airy palette on this album, but with some spacious synthesizer and minimal metronomic beatwork.  The most difficult track on here to get mixed was probably "Mary Beth on the Mezzanine" (those levels!!!) and the easiest was probably "Seafoam in Her Hair" (it was one of those moments that just kind of happened :) _). "Sun Vitality" became one of my favorite Snowbride tracks after we got it done, I finally felt like we wrote a sequel to "Breathing Neon, My Sweet" (if that was Snowbride taking on Italo disco then perhaps "Sun Vitality" was us somehow taking on ambient house). I was lucky to make this one with Rachel, she's a constant inspiration. There are several things on this record she did that I would have never though of, and Rachel has a great ear.



sincerely yours, DH