Chicago based electronic composer Brett Naucke has announced the release of a new album, following last year’s EMS Hallucinations. Entitled Mirror Ensemble, the album is a collaboration with longtime friends Natalie Chami (TALsounds, Good Willsmith, Damiana) and Whitney Johnson (Matchess, Damiana) and arrives on October 1st through American Dreams.
Naucke ventures quite far from his previous works fully based in various synthesizer types, with the upcoming Mirror Ensemble “often boasting melodic vocalization, strings, and lush layered synthesis.” The press release describes the album as “a synthesizer record, an orchestral record, and in some ways even a soundtrack”. Mirror Ensemble saw Naucke using scenes from Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece 1975 film The Mirror, which served as a key element for mood and atmosphere.

Speaking about this collaboration, Chami explains:

“He invited Whitney and I over for wine and cheese, and was like, ‘I have an idea for a record. He showed us clips from The Mirror with the vibe he wanted, and also shared recordings and other ideas. It was straight up like a fucking PowerPoint almost – like an audio-visual presentation for us.”

The striking and ethereal lead single ‘The Glass Shifting’ and the contemplative and gentle ‘Rose Water’ open a window onto what he has in store for us. Listen to both below.

Last month, Chicago electronic composer Brett Naucke teased his upcoming album, EMS Hallucinations, with the deeply immersive and mesmerizing ‘Hallucinations IV’. EMS Hallucinations is the fruit of a recent residency at the Elektronmusikstudion aka EMS, the paramount electronic studio created in Sweden in 1964, where Naucke composed two side-long pieces, recorded on two rare synthesizer systems. With release day less than a month away, he has shared a second excerpt off the album, ‘Hallucinations II’, offered with an accompanying video, courtesy of Cinema.av’s Evan Henry. Here it is.

EMS Hallucinations is out on September 11th through American Dreams Records.

With a vast body of work under his belt, including live performance, film scores, sound design for interactive gaming, and audio installations, Chicago based electronic composer Brett Naucke has been dabbling with modular synthesis for a long time. Well versed in various synthesizer types, Naucke has collaborated with bands like Bitchin Bajas, Pulse Emitter, TALSounds, Michael Vallera, and Ryley Walker, and has also been a member of avant-art collective ONO since 2013. He has announced the release of a new solo album, EMS Hallucinations, the fruit of a residency at EMS in Stockholm. A paramount electronic studio, created in 1964, the Elektronmusikstudion aka EMS has hosted notable composers and musicians over the years such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Philip Glass, Morton Subotnick, Mark Fell, or Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley. Every year, EMS continue to host their artist-in-residency program, with Naucke being one of the recent resident guests. There, he composed two side-long pieces, recorded on two rare synthesizer systems, a Buchla 200 and a Serge Modular. On the forthcoming album, and as the press release describes, “the intimate is the music, its instrumentation, the journey it took to get there.”

EMS Hallucinations is set for release on September 11th through American Dreams Records, and Naucke is offering a preview of the album in the form of the deeply immersive and mesmerizing ‘Hallucinations IV’, an edit from side one. It comes with an accompanying video directed and edited by Nick Ciontea of brownshoesonly. Take a look below and let yourself be carried with it.