Veteran experimentalist, Marcia Bassett, returns with "Midnight Xpander", easily one of the most exciting entries into the field of drone and contemporary minimalism that we've encountered in a good while. Predominantly recorded on the Buchla 200 system at EMS in Stockholm, Sweden, and imbued with abstraction and the bristling tension of punk and noise, its subtle structures and intertwining harmonics immerse the mind in a deeply organific, hallucinatory realm that places Bassett at the forefront of the field.

Since first emerging in the late 1990s as a member of the legendary outfit, Double Leopards, Marcia Bassett has been a fixture on both the NY and global scenes of experimental music. Known for her many collaborations - including a particularly fruitful and enduring partnership with Samara Lubelski - as well as a substantial body of solo work issued under her own name and the moniker, Zaïmph, she has consistently pushed the field of noise into new and exciting territories, straddling a deeply personal sense of delicate intricacy and furious fire. Her latest LP, “Midnight Xpander”, issued by Bassett’s own YEW Recordings imprint, takes us deeper into this exploratory realm via four compositions constructed around tense harmonic collisions of electronic long-tones. It’s hands down one of our favourite releases from Bassett to date.

While Bassett’s evolving practice has deployed a vast range of sound sources over her decades of activity - handmade electronic instruments, guitar, vocals, field recordings, and tape manipulation - in recent years she has become increasingly focused on deeply personal explorations of electronic synthesis, notably using the Buchla Music Easel and other modular systems. Predominately recorded at EMS in Stockholm, Sweden, in late October, 2019, “Midnight Xpander” continues this line of inquiry on the studio’s Buchla 200 system to astounding effect.

While certainly no stranger to drone, “Midnight Xpander” encounters Bassett embracing a more explicitly minimalist set of parameters, and the microtonal possibilities activated therein. The album’s four compositions - “Glacial Scar”, “Brunnsviken”, “Greenness Once More”, and “Nocturne After Tyra Kleen” - intertwine a bristling, tense palette of long-tone harmonics drawing upon the Buchla’s highly individual timbral and tonal qualities, that imbues them with a profoundly human and emotive presence.

Channelling the seasonal transition from autumn to winter - “ a darkening sky, the rise and fall of repetitions stretch through and between time” - over the course of “Midnight Xpander’s” development Bassett immersed herself in explorations of abstraction, expanding her palette to include subtle interventions of other sound sources - Andrew Lafkas on bass on the album’s opener, “Glacial Scar”, bells, field recording, and others - weaving delicate textures into her pulsing world of intersecting tonality, to produce almost hallucinatory, otherworldly effects.

Sublime, immersive, and incredibly tense, there’s urgency across the album’s length, drawing upon punk and noise, that rarely seems to enter into this realm, and Bassett delivers the proof that it clearly should.