To purchase the lossless version of this release, please visit our Bandcamp page: https://williamselman.bandcamp.com/album/naming-before-names

Format: Digital Album
Cat no: MOTDLP006
Release Date: March 27, 2020

Tracklist:
1. Radicant Fabrics
2. Bastard Algebra
3. Swimming in Contingency
4. Bubble House in Shallow Depth
5. A New Old Firmament
6. Home and Territory
7. Realgar Bay
8. Kilo Pavillion

Release info:

Mysteries of the Deep is delighted to present its second album by Portland, Oregon-based musician and multimedia artist William Selman, “Naming Before Names.” In a world that demands categorization of everything around us through taxonomies, genres, and strict schemas, Selman’s album aims to explore the spaces between categories. His goal is not to offer concrete explanatory gestures, but rather, to create a deliberate space for suspension and ambiguity. These eight compositions conjure a world in which humans are asked to stand on the periphery, observing their surroundings from a vantage of curious wonder, rather than clear definition.

Selman draws from distinct sonic realms, however, citing David Berhman, Maggi Payne, and Alvin Curran as influences. He says, “I like the way these artists use simple forms to ground dense compositions with an approach to composition that is both improvisational and collage-like.” In line with this sentiment, the album’s quality is uncannily natural. Many of Selman’s field recordings, collected over a twenty-year period, find a home here, adorning a landscape that’s as visual as it is sonic; we hear hydrophone recordings of tide pools and summer lagoons, grasshopper wings in a lava field, broken humidifiers and sandstorms alongside moments of intentional instrumentation. Light vibraphone gives way to slow hand drum movements. Textured synths add viscosity without extracting us from the ecological world. It feels inaccurate to say the album’s occasional rhythms are constructed; rather, patterns seem to arise organically out of the aether. In Selman’s universe, there’s a sense that everything exists in primordial unity, untouched by the human imprint that insists on fragmenting the world into recognizable parts.

Written, produced, and recorded by William Selman in Portland, Oregon Jan 2018 - Feb 2020
Bass guitar on "A New Old Firmament" by Steve Wade
Special thanks to Paul Dickow and Marcus Fischer for percussion and the time-share vibraphone
Additional mixing by Oliver Chapoy at Ohm Sweet Ohm, NY
Mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri at Black Knoll Studio, NY
Photography by Candace Price
Words by Taylor Bratches

Worldwide Distribution: wordandsound → what people play