Earthen Sea is the experimental ambient/techno project of Brooklyn, New York based Jacob Long, best known to indie rock fans as a member of the Dischord-signed post-hardcore group, Black Eyes, and the dubby, drum-heavy post-punk band, Mi Ami. On his own, however, he crafts a compelling synthesis of shadowy rhythms and opaque atmospherics, drawing on the most potent qualities of melancholic ambient and dub techno. He began releasing Earthen Sea material during the early 2000s. Released on limited-edition cassettes and CD-Rs, some of his earliest material utilized violin, tape decks and keyboards to create eerie soundscapes and meditative drones. In 2014, taking a more beat oriented approach, the Mirage EP was released on the Lovers Rock imprint, and was followed by the project’s first full-length, Ink, which appeared on Lovers Rock in 2015, with a digital EP titled The Sun Will Rise was released by Nicolas Jaar’s Other People in 2016. Following a move to Brooklyn, Long released An Act of Love, his debut on Kranky, in 2017. Two years later, the same label released his third record, Grass and Trees, which presented a stripped-down, skeletonized version of dub techno. Ghost Poems, a record of fluttering arrhythmias of dust, percussion, and yearning, was his most recent release, in 2022.
Today, Jacob Long announces his fourth full-length for Kranky, which began as a notion to reimagine Earthen Sea as a “piano trio”, inspired by a year-long immersion in the ECM label catalog, but the compositions soon grew more complex. Elements were chopped and resampled, then layered with bass, drums, percussion, and additional keys. The result is a fusion of live band acoustics and downtempo loops, sculpted into nine smoke-and-mirror dubs of fractured jazz, soft-focus noir, and trip-hop dust: Recollection. Like the title implies, Long’s playing and production share a mood of pensive movement, shuffling and rippling like uncertain memories at strange hours. From the looming fog on “Present Day” and “Neon Ruins”, and shadowy breaks on “Another Space” and “Cloudy Vagueness”, to rosy glows on “Clear Photograph” and smeared reverie on “White Sky”, Recollection deftly wields its palette of gradient color and subdued states of beauty. His is a music of reduction and reflection, kinetic but oblique, attuned to the silhouettes of sound.
Recollection will be released on November 15th via Kranky. Pre-orders are now available here.
Photo credit: Debbie Tuch
