Pleasure - Jream House (LP)

Facts Jream House is the turbulent and spiritual debut LP of Mark Hurst aka A Pleasure, following his 2014 Extended Play digital EP on Other People. Blending mathematical composition with unrestrained studio experimentalism, the sound of A Pleasure charts a space where formative influences confront the most immediate performative impulse. Using a process of numerical transposition, the names of personally significant bands and composers are converted into drum patterns. Then Hurst let's loose, improvising around these structures with a variety of traditional and unorthodox instruments, including bass and guitar, bowed cymbals, drum machines juggled like turntables, and blowtorch on aluminum, to name a few. With his influences as starting points, he builds rhythmic structures and blasts them with walls of noise, monolithic bass lines, and other jam-shrapnel. Despite the chaos and complexity of the process, the results sound neither clinical nor garbled. The tracks always find their way to an emotive melody or strong groove. Lush guitar strums and yearning keys ride the high-speed beat of Slow Channel, which seems to soar through cloud-cover as one snaking mass. The Order of Things folds a cosmic guitar-part into a backdrop of heavily side-chained noise. Arthur Russell features a neck-snapping rimshot and crushed snare that splash up the bits of an elegiac vocal part. Through violent and idyllic atmospheres, Jream House jettisons it's inspirations like landing shuttles, always in search of new ground. These are songs, not just experiments.