M. Geddes Gengras – Expressed, I Noticed Silence

To be released on CD, cassette, and digitally on 7/15/22. Artwork by HausMo Max. CD packaged in a mini-LP jacket. C38 – orange cassette with black imprints. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To purchase, head to our Bandcamp page.

Over the last decade, M. Geddes Gengras has released an enormous catalog of wide-ranging, synth-focused music in both solo and collaborative settings. He has participated in influential experimental groups like Sun Araw, Pocahaunted, Robedoor, and Akron/Family. Along with Sun Araw’s Cameron Stallones and a host of Jamaican singers and artists, Gengras continues to blur the boundaries of dub and electronic music under the name Duppy Gun Productions. The project initially solidified with an acclaimed collaboration called Icon Give Thank (RVNG, 2012) with roots reggae legends The Congos. His solo works have appeared on labels like Room40, Leaving Records, Holy Mountain, and Umor Rex. After many years living in Los Angeles, Gengras is now based out of Hudson, NY.

Expressed, I Noticed Silence, Gengras’s third release on Hausu Mountain, follows the topographical ambient synth networks of I Am The Last of That Green and Warm-Hued World (HAUSMO88, 2019) and the dense technoid beat experiments of Time Makes Nothing Happen (HAUSMO109, 2020). The album once again exemplifies Gengras’s penchant for constant self-reinvention and genre-defiant exploration within a catalog whose every release carries his essence as a composer and synthesist while surging forward into new ideas and territories. With Gengras’s slowly unfurling ambient landscapes and his signature approach to rhythms animated by cyclical basslines and the layering of high-definition synth voices, Expressed, I Noticed Silence builds on the precedents set by his recent output while digging deeper into melodic sculpting and lush harmonic architectures than ever before.

The album’s crystal-clear production and attention to fine details of spatialization and interaction between synth voices and string instruments yields a luminous spread of sounds. If you were to split hairs regarding its genre designation, you might say that the album proves too active and continually evolving to be purely ambient music in its most elemental form, with a network of flowing melodic voices and contrasting textures perhaps best compared to the kosmische movement of the German experimental scene in the 1970s. The presence of Gengras’s brother Cyrus Gengras (who has worked with artists like Kevin Morby, Amen Dunes, and Jessica Pratt) on electric guitar, casting off glistening lead melodies and webs of clean-toned arpeggios, cements the connection to the delay-drenched guitar work of precedents like Manuel Göttsching and Robert Fripp. The album’s zoned atmospheres and slow-building tiers of synth call to mind the interplanetary explorations of astral electronic music composers like Klaus Schulze, Michael Stearns, and Jonn Serrie. More than anything in Gengras’s recent catalog, Expressed, I Noticed Silence continues along the arc of more modern post-kosmiche contemporaries including Emeralds, Bitchin Bajas, and Hausu Mountain label-mate Pulse Emitter.

Though primarily built around floating melodies and swirling beds of tones, Expressed, I Noticed Silence finds Gengras in a more grid-focused headspace in which individual synth patches lay out a rhythmic foundation around which attendant, more arrhythmic layers compound. M. Geddes Gengras’s synth basses and Cyrus Gengras’s electric bass serve as both a driving force and a continual harmonic complement, laying out guideposts for the development of each piece. Gengras’s mixes never feel too full or needlessly cluttered with swathes of input for their own sake, as each lustrous synth pad smears across the stereo spread with its own grain and character that arrives in fully rendered detail — all the while making sure to provide contrast within each electronic tapestry with the onset of a particularly twitchy or brittle tone that rattles against the flow. He takes his time to introduce new voices to his compositions, making sure that the colors on the canvas have dried into their own impression before sweeping them off diagonally into a new configuration.

The six tracks on Expressed, I Noticed Silence all move past the five minute mark, and join together to lay out a trajectory through slightly differing geographies that all feel like part of the same world map. This sense of cohesion in both the melodic frameworks and the full menu of voices on display at any moment establishes a dreamlike overarching narrative that seems at once perfectly static and constantly shifting. The album testifies to M. Geddes Gengras’s skill not only as a sculptor of tone and texture, but as a storyteller in the medium of electronic music — using the tools at his disposal to conjure complex moods and emotional spaces that lay out vistas looking across zones that approach the distant horizon.