The New York label present one of their most unique releases to date with a tape and zine dedicated to an obscure psych artist.
For someone with reasonably limited exposure, Austin Cesear has managed to leave quite an impression with his releases thus far. It helps of course that his sound has found favour with those steering such vaunted ships as Opal Tapes, Proibito and Public Information, for whom he returns to serve a follow-up to his Cruise Forever debut, but such affiliations only speak to the quality of the music rather than some notion of right-place-right-time hype. His first long player on Public Information was certainly a striking affair that drew on all manner of house and techno abstractions to make its presence felt, with plenty of dubby sensibilities rubbed into its muscles and ample breathing room for experimentation. It’s a premise that continues with West Side, a six-tracker reportedly written in homage to the docks of Oakland, California; although music of this nature is fairly wide open to thematic interpretation.
Function & Vatican Shadow, Boothroyd, Austin Cesear, Max D and more featured among the week’s best records.
The San Francisco-based producer will return to Public Information with a six-track mini LP later this month.
Going back to Austin Cesear’s 2012 Public Information debut Cruise Forever, it becomes quite apparent just how ahead of the game the Oakland-based producer was. While there’s certainly no shortage of lo-fi, dreamlike house music doing the rounds at the moment, Cruise Forever still stands up as a stellar piece of work, combining murky house tracks with ambient interludes that sound like the barely audible atomic hum coming off an irradiated wasteland. Although the LP veered stylistically from ethnic percussion to Mills-inspired techno in a flash, the consistently murky pallette and downtrodden mood which ran throughout its nine tracks ensured one of the strongest debuts of 2012.
Records from Perc, Austin Cesear, Vaghe Stelle and Rhythmic Theory were among this week’s gems.
Listen to a live set from Public Information’s Austin Cesear, recorded in San Francisco last weekend.
Hailing from the West Coast of the USA and sporting a name like a lost disco producer, you’d be forgiven for thinking Austin Cesear is one of the latest contemporary producers on 100% Silk creating vintage leaning house. In reality, Cesear’s debut album Cruise Forever marks him out as something of an outsider to this scene, exploring darker and more cerebral territory that wouldn’t sound out of place on labels like Modern Love or PAN. This of course will be unsurprising to anyone following the releases of Public Information, the UK based label responsible for the record’s release, whose output seems to share a common sense of otherworldliness, existing in the gaps between library music, techno and psychedelia.
Ace London based label Public Information will continue its remit to provide a survey of electronic music with the release of an album from American producer Austin Cesear in late July.