dominic voz: right to the city

Chicago by way of Portland musician Dominic Voz fuses ambient, classical, spoken word, and deconstructed dance music into an album of visceral beauty and heady ideas. Grappling with themes of urban contestation and dispossession, Right To The City celebrates our communal fabric in the face of contemporary capitalism's social stratification and endemic violence. The album is the first co-release between Accidental Records, renowned electronic musician Matthew Herbert's hub of experimental releases, and Portland's Beacon Sound, a stalwart of gorgeous and innovative music from the Pacific Northwest and beyond. The album features several collaborators, including Patricia Wolf (Balmat) and Jonathan Sielaff of Golden Retriever (Thrill Jockey). "As far back as I can remember, I have been obsessed with cities. As a child, I was fascinated by their richness and mythology -- the romance of cities, which is so ubiquitous across the American psyche. No doubt aided by the lore of countless films and photographs, I grew up yearning for an identity filled with grit and relevance that a city life seemed to provide. As an adult social worker and city dweller, my fascination morphed into a focus on the social arrangements and contestation produced in urban settings. Right to the City is my own way of unraveling these ideas through a process of fractured storytelling; some of the songs are meant as imagined ethnographies of the people dispossessed and marginalized in cities while others are vignettes meant to soundtrack a besieged urban existence -- a visceral immersion into the warring sounds of the city. They are decidedly not 'protest songs'; they are my love letters to, and nightmares of, Portland and Chicago over two fraught years, told through characters from every corner of my life. I ripped samples of riot munitions and street chants from television news and YouTube, recorded police sirens in the street, enlisted friends to play cello and clarinet and to recite fragments of poems, and experimented with a half dozen forms of synthesis. In the end, I tried to make something that molded all the inputs into a coherent story that was by turns hushed and wailing." --Dominic Voz RIYL: Holly Herndon, SND, Autechre, SOPHIE, James Ferraro, Ikue Mori, Nobakazu Takemura, Mouse of Mars, Matmos, Foodman, Laurel Halo, Jim O'Rourke. Edition of 300.