Photo: Tommy McAdams

We’ve been eagerly waiting for the release of Matt McBane‘s Buoy since the composer, electronic musician, and violinist announced its release at the tail end of last year, alongside the immersively gorgeous and engrossing single ‘Eleven Eleven’. A record of patterns and ambience for synthesizers and violin, Buoy marks McBane’s first electronic album and first solo album and it sprouted from a 2020 performance at Brooklyn’s National Sawdust curated by Laurie Anderson and Arto Lindsay.

Ahead of the album’s release on February 28th through Gradient Music, McBane has shared a new single titled ‘Arpeggiator’. Speaking about the track, he comments:

“With ‘Arpeggiator’, I imagined an intersection of the classical minimalism of Philip Glass and the minimalist techno of Robert Hood. The result is a continuous flow of repeated arpeggios on the violin and synthesizer over drum machine patterns. These all follow strict additive and subtractive processes, moving from patterns of 3 to 4 to 5, etc and back again. The name ‘Arpeggiator’ is a reference to a standard function of synthesizers to automatically arpeggiate held chords — an easy way to create a seemingly virtuosic cascade of notes. In my piece, these arpeggios are played on the violin (in addition to synthesizer) for an actual virtuosic feat of stamina and concentration imitating the machine-generated notes.”

Listen to ‘Arpeggiator’ below and get ready for an exhilarating and kaleidoscopic ride.