Two years on from the striking sonic statements that defined his last full-length, ‘Translucents’, the Los Angeles based artist and composer, Byron Westbrook, returns to Shelter Press with ‘A Landform Embodies a Mythical Creature’, his latest exploration of the relationships between sound and the visual realm. Comprising sixteen audio “environments”, created in response to the long-exposure photographs of the Los Angeles based artist, Brice Bischoff, ‘A Landform Embodies a Mythical Creature’ finds Westbrook - a singular voice within the contemporary landscape of electroacoustic music - forging deeper and deeper into the abstract realms, culminating as a series of entwined, spacious soundscapes of startling detail and psychological force.

Over the years of its activities since launching in 2012, the French imprint, Shelter Press (founded and run by Bartolomé Sanson and Félicia Atkinson), has become an emblem of the best of what is possible at the juncture of publishing and the creative products of those who occupy the realms of experimental and adventurous sound. Falling closer to the architectures of family and community than those generally associated with a record label or producer of books, Shelter has become a creative ecosystem within which ideas and ambitions are fostered and supported, assembling a catalog of releases by some of the most noteworthy artists working today: Atkinson, Okkyung Lee, Joshua Bonnetta, Gabriel Saloman, Stephen O'Malley, Kassel Jaeger, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Thomas Ankersmit, John Also Bennett, Marina Rosenfeld, Claire Rousay, James Rushford, Valerio Tricoli, and numerous others. In most cases, artists return to the imprint again and again, allowing their efforts to rest within the network of connections and context that it provides. Their latest, ‘A Landform Embodies a Mythical Creature’, by the Los Angeles-based musician and composer, Byron Westbrook, distills all of these points at their best. Subtle and sublime, with Westbrook increasingly moving away from tangible associations with musicality in favor of sprawling, spacious soundscapes marked by abstract formation of textures and resonance, it stands among his most striking and accomplished releases to date.

First emerging within New York’s rigorous context of experimental music, for the better part of the last two decades, the Los Angeles based musician and composer, Byron Westbrook, has woven progressively intricate tapestries of sonority that bridge the worlds of sound art, installation, avant-garde electronic music, and synthesis. Working at an almost glacial pace - allowing the meaning and relationships within his sonic material to evolve and emerge over long durations before a piece reaches its final form - Westbrook’s practice has largely centered around the creation of hyper-specific sound environments that question or pursue a deconstruction of presumed or imposed understanding, appearing across full-lengths issued by Root Strata, Hands In The Dark, Umor Rex, Ash International, and most recently Shelter Press. Much like his friend and mentor, Phill Niblock, Westbrook has maintained an intimate relationship between sound and image that has expressed itself in various forms over the last decade or so, beginning with his 2015 album ‘Precipice’ and its corresponding audiovisual installation, and the numerous full-lengths that progressed toward 2024’s ‘Translucents’, which incorporated photographs by the composer himself. In each instance, he has taken a philosophical approach to the detailed construction of soundscapes, “creating perceptible color, texture and physical space by carefully analyzing his various elements and their psychological effect on the listener, using techniques that are often only employed by film technicians.” Continuing his explorations of the "audio afterimage" - bending the history of electroacoustic music in on itself - Westbrook’s latest, ‘A Landform Embodies a Mythical Creature’, encounters an even greater attentiveness to harmonize the sonic realm with the language of visual art, working in parallel with acclaimed Los Angeles-based artist Brice Bischoff, whose experimental approaches and resulting photographs are deeply sympathetic with the composer’s own concerns.

Both natives of southern Louisiana now residing in Los Angeles, Westbrook and Bischoff met in 2013 and immediately found striking commonalities in their shared fascination with duration and perception, and its links to the extreme heat and humidity of where they grew up. Engaging the metaphysical and artistic practice as a means to suggest a world beyond our own, Westbrook’s use of long, detailed stretches of sound (exploring space, texture and sonic color) found a logical creative counterpoint with Bischoff’s 15+ minute long exposures and the phantom remnants that they achieve, and the pair embarked upon the collaboration that would result in ‘A Landform Embodies a Mythical Creature’ - taking its title from Bischoff's book “How Close” and its photographs - with the latter directly informing Westbrook's approach to his construction of the sixteen discrete “audio scenes” that comprise the album, each responding directly to one of the book's photographs.

Utilizing a palette of sonority drawn from cassette recordings of his real-world interactions with resonant spaces - variously deployed to create echoes and drones in canyons, caves and ravines - that were then augmented with processing and spatial effects familiar within film, Westbrook began fabricating artificial zones within his concrete environments, stating that: "For some time, I've been using sound to represent a sense of presence that can be visualized. I've also been experimenting with the activation of environments as a way to illustrate space, so Bischoff's photographs, with their ghostly blurs of human intervention and sculptural objects, provided a unique prompt to explore that idea further." The result, as it unfurls across the album’s two sides, almost pointedly forgoes tangible signifiers of musicality in favor of sprawling states of abstraction, within which textures and resonance occupy and interact within the densities of implied space. At times harkening back to the golden age of GRM, each of Westbrook's pieces deploys constrained sonic material at an elemental level, maximizing each sound into otherworldly and transportive soundscapes that resemble something close to painting with sound as their metamorphoses envelop the ear.

Haunting and beautiful - blurring the boundaries between tangible and imagined worlds - in both its discrete moments and totality, Byron Westbrook’s ‘A Landform Embodies a Mythical Creature’ is a brilliantly accomplished piece of work. There couldn’t be a better home for it than the context of community and collaboration fostered by Shelter Press. It's a record laden with evolution and surprise that continues to reveal new dimensions at every return: a record to be lived with and occupied rather than simply to be passed through. Once again Westbrook has left us hotly anticipating where he might go next.