Beacon Sound and Jacktone Records are pleased to announce a limited edition joint vinyl release by Hugo RA Paris titled Threaded Habitat. The new LP from Paris follows two of Jacktone’s most popular releases: Mystique Youth(2015) and Horizons Beneath The Surface (2016), which appeared under his alias, Lavender.
The transition to the Hugo RA Paris moniker with this album marks a more personal shift in approach. Threaded Habitat combines ambient textures and techno rhythms to reflect tension between humanity and nature—particularly the cyclical nature of collapse and renewal. It also marks Jacktone's first collaborative release with the record store and label Beacon Sound, which has put out works from veteran experimental musicians like Terry Riley and Colleen. Beacon Sound is an important node in Portland, where Paris also lives and developed the flagship modular product for leading Eurorack manufacturer 4MS: the SWN.
The album's closing track was entirely composed on a SWN prototype and recorded in one take. In fact, much of his work is done in layers of single takes with minimal processing to preserve its raw emotion and embrace minor imperfections. As an MIT-trained engineer and physicist, working with hardware—from modulars to guitar pedals and tape loops—is essential to his process of not only making but exploring sound.
Threaded Habitat captures moments of claustrophobia and bliss in seven tracks and three accompanying videos directed by New Zealand artist Sam Hamilton. Visual art plays a central role in many of Paris’s projects, which include intricate audio-visual performances and scores for full-length films like The Modern Jungle (La Selva Negra) and its forthcoming follow-up.
The LP will was made available to pre-order on July 1st 2019 with a limited, exclusive content sample pack. The handmade vinyl package features photography by Sam Hamilton and was released July 19 through Jacktone and Beacon Sound’s webshops, with worldwide sales beginning August 2nd. A remix release will arrive later in 2020.
Horizons Beneath the Surface, Hugo R.A. Paris' second album as Lavender for Berlin/Detroit label Jacktone, synthesizes sounds at the intersection of Sci Fi and children’s literature. That dark, supernatural space where Alice in Wonderland meets Dune, near the vintage animated film La planète sauvage, Lavender’s tracks create fantastic, surreal narratives. Each track is a chapter, scene or vignette from a greater, hypnagogic mythology.
Hugo R.A. Paris' approach to electronic composition is raw, live and immediate, favoring one-and-done studio takes as his vintage synths and modular racks drone, throb and sputter.
With the complex spontaneity of early Pink Floyd, and the uncanny atmospherics of John Carpenter’s soundtracks, Lavender wields these untamable machines to wrest from them deep emotion. This is far from clinical grid programming. This is improvisation and perspiration.
He tunes his ears towards an ‘early’ synthesizer music history – not to create something vintage, but rather approaching his gear as if for the first time, outside of history. Timeless.
Certain recordings are meant to be absorbed as sensorial experiences - reminders that music is not only about hooks and melodies, but it is deeply grounded on textural qualities, ambience and raw emotion.
This is the vision that drives the work of San Francisco-based composer and producer Lavender / Hugo R.A.Paris. His forward-thinking and ethereal songs echo the work of artists the likes of Alessandro Cortini, Tim Hecker and Deru, just to mention a few.
His first album "Mystique Youth" embodies the aesthetics of minimal electronica, the cinematic landscapes of post rock and the organic qualities of experimentalism.