Grandeur & Weakness

The North Sea is the solo project of Brad Rose, co-founder of Digitalis Recordings, Altar Eagle, and a plethora of other top-notch shenanigans. This is his swansong under the North Sea moniker, and damn if he couldn’t have chosen a better way to end it. (He’s going on hiatus due to the imminent responsibilities of fatherhood—congrats, Brad!) What we have here is a series of tripped-out synth explorations, noisy and layered with dark found-sound, tribal beats, laser beams, static helicopter battles, you name it. The album is designed as a musing on “the psychological effect of colonization” based on the book “The Wretched Of The Earth”—Rose also claims that this is the most time-consuming solo release of his career. Incredible, pensive stuff. If you think experimental music is just mindless cacophony, listen to this if you can handle being proven dead wrong. Trust me, having your mind blown is never a bad thing.
RIYL Zac Nelson, Mark Bradley, Yellow Swans

1. (6:37)* screeching synth oscillations, ray guns, warped scintillating bliss soon buried under dark synth drone; things get old school Berlin-style at the end, Kraftwerk on Adderall and poppyseed tea
2. (5:50) dark industrial clanging, nightmare train station audiohallucination, whirring loops
3. (8:23)** lurid, lugubrious drone, rough at the edges and deeply unsettling. don’t meditate to this if you want to keep your will to live.
4. (4:28) post-colonial Star Trek fan fiction soundtrack—bouncing, syncopated vaguely African-inspired electronic percussion with impatient synth wanderings, laser beams, static
5. (5:13)* aptly titled “intimidation tactics”—shifting synth tones and squiggly noiseworms evoke a haunting experience, like the soundtrack to a torture manual
6. (5:27) electronic dolphin-song oscillations, throbbing underwater cenote ritual
7. (5:23) blurred, unsettling, chaotic; verges on harsh noise sometimes, fades into…
8. (1:06) a calm, lush ambient outro with erratic percussion fading away in the background—the sonic symbolism couldn’t be more clear on the closing track “Colonized”