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LP
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CIS 170LP
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Ali O'May and Frazer Brown first met in early 2018, performing with their respective bands at an Electronic Music Open Mic (EMOM) night in Edinburgh. A shared musical sensibility was immediately apparent, and a few months later Ali handed Frazer a USB drive loaded with stems recorded directly from his vast modular system. Over the summer and autumn of 2019, Frazer took around a dozen of those stems as the foundation for a collection of tracks, shaping them into fully realized pieces spanning techno, lo-fi, breaks, acid house and ambient. And so, the Dohnavúr method was born: Ali coaxing raw materials from his modular setup, and Frazer working them up instinctively -- his encyclopedic knowledge of electronic music guiding the feel, genre and direction suggested by Ali's foundational building blocks. It's a genuinely unique way of working, and the results speak for themselves. We Owe Each Other Everything continues to redefine the Dohnavúr method. Built once again from a new set of modular creations by Ali, and expertly shaped by Frazer in his Armadale studio, it's an extraordinarily diverse and exciting collection -- cohesive yet wide-ranging, this is music that hits you directly in the heart and the solar plexus. It makes you feel things. Side one opens with the sawtooth resonance of "Flowers in the Barrel," moves through the clattering momentum of "Ready for '91," and arrives at "Make It in Livingston" -- a darkly ominous commentary on the new town where Frazer grew up. Side two delivers the haunting beauty of "Acetylene," the cinematic, eighties-inflected uplift of "Powerless," and closes with "Unwavering" -- an emotional gut-punch featuring vocals from Emile Wauters (aka Autumna) that once heard will not be forgotten. We Owe Each Other Everything is Dohnavúr at their most powerful and assured: two musicians with a singular creative chemistry, making music that is impossible to categorize and impossible to ignore.
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