Deluxe LP w 180g Vinyl Printed inner sleeve - MP3 Download

- Kranky, Idle Hands, 100% Silk, Endless Flight, and Entr'acte recording artist.
- 2nd Further release after his 2015 album “Noise Tape Self”

Tracklist LP/CD:
A1. Public Voyeurs (7:14) , A2. Relix (14:02)
B1. Fossil Data (9:18) , B2. Tower of Babble (8:11)

Like some ingenious combination of John Cage's chance operations and the numbers station data stream captured on The Conet Project, Strategy's new album immerses listeners in baffling sonic waters.
It's a riveting work that converts the enigmatic effluvia of shortwave and dispatch radio chatter into thrumming, staticriddled clouds of ambience. An undercurrent of unease wafts through Information
Pollution's four lengthy tracks, as barely audible molecules of aural junk never meant for public consumption get repurposed into an unsettling strain of inverted chillout music.
Information Pollution was born out of restraints. After moving into a new house with little space to set up his studio properly, Strategy (Portland producer Paul Dickow) could only work with a few devices at a
time. He'd acquired an old Akai reeltoreel tape deck with tube preamps from his father, who'd recently cleaned out his own studio. Using radios, homemade effects boxes, and the tape deck, Strategy recorded these sound collages live to tape, without touching any synths or deploying any samples. “I discovered a lot of ghostly shortwave sounds,” Dickow says, “but also ambulance, parking, and school bus dispatch channels on forgotten frequencies that I think might have been once used for police or broadcast TV.” The result falls somewhere between Philip Jeck's eroding turntable symphonies and William Basinski's poignantly decaying Disintegration Loops.

Dickow relates that he uses the term “Information Pollution” to classify “any spam, broadcast saturation, junk mail, invasion of unwanted information [that enters] the socialemotional public realm.” As with the material Strategy created with cassette tape loops on his last Further release, 2015's Noise Tape Self, “there's a sense of machines having their own life, beyond our control.” But instead of chaos, Strategy has produced an artful alchemization of discarded tones. Although Information Pollution sounds unlike anything in Strategy's sprawling catalog, he likens the album to his activities within Portland's '90s/early '00s experimental/noise scene. The reason he hasn't issued anything in this style till now? He wanted to wait till he was sure he'd “given it the necessary rigor and study.” With this album Strategy has shaped the random output of radios into a gripping document. As Dickow puts it, “This is the audio equivalent of photographing the oil slicks that appear in the puddles of parking lots."












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LP FUR096LP UPC: 827170568662 Release : 25.05.2015

- Kranky, Idle Hands, 100% Silk, Endless Flight, and Entr'acte recording artist + Mutek 2015 performer

Tracklist LP:
A1 Awesome Piano (6:22) A2 Cassette Loop (6:08) A3 Ominous Lovely Piano (4:21)
B1 Lovely Loop (6:43) B2 Hobgoblin (3:21) B3 Rhen's Loop (8:51)

Short info:
With a quiet intensity over the last 12 years, Strategy has proven himself to be an incredibly resourceful and rewarding musician in both group settings and as a solo artist. In the latter guise, this Portland producer/multi-instrumentalist (aka Paul Dickow) has released a prolific amount of excellent work for quality indie labels such as Kranky, Idle Hands, 100% Silk, Endless Flight, and Entr'acte, putting a cerebral yet sensual spin on dub, ambient, post rock, and house music.
For his Further Records debut, Noise Tape Self, Strategy delves ever deeper into his more ambient inclinations and experiments with tape loops. Most of the six tracks bear titles more suited for a library record, but Noise Tape Self lacks library music's faceless functionality; rather, it's an immersive soundtrack to stimulating one's imagination or losing one's bearings. Dickow says he became obsessed with making tape music in 2008, after tiring of using the computer as his main instrument. Fellow Portland producer/ingenious gear-tinkerer David Chandler (Solenoid) taught Dickow "how to make a tape loop that could be put inside a cassette tape. I got really into this, and got a 4 track, knowing this would allow me to have four synchronized loops per tape. I would then run each channel through a series of effects and 'perform' live mixes using the loops. I alternated between using source material of my own devising and using whatever source material happened to be on the cassettes I was hacking."
Noise Tape Self kicks off with "Awesome Piano," in which a fragment of a beautiful piano motif gets overwhelmed by a glorious vortex of static and distortion. We're immediately submerged in Strategy's alluring and disorienting world, where rupture and rapture converge. "Cassette Loop" is a gorgeous ambient piece with a lulling, aquatic quality that recalls such masters of uneasy listening as Rapoon, O Yuki Conjugate, and Aube. The self-descriptive "Ominous Lovely Piano" is a ghostly, microcosmic form of dub, an ultimate kind of headphone music of deep psychedelic interiority that's reminiscent of Paul Schütze's 1996 masterpiece, Apart. The hypnotic/amniotic ambience of "Lovely Loop" whispers of a peaceful eternity; this track could be an important step toward a new, improved strain of New Age. The album closes with "Rhen's Loop"; here's where the album really soars into the stratosphere and grows surreal wings. A five-dimensional headfuck of what sounds like analog-synth growls and whirs and desolate drones, "Rhen's Loop" is Doppler effected and disorienting, like a more somber take on Conrad Schnitzler's Ballet Statique. With Noise Tape Self, Strategy has found a way to build works of compelling, intimate grandeur with some of the humblest of sonic atoms. It's an alchemical wonder.















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