padna: burnt offerings

The Preservation label presents Burnt Offerings, the fourth album from Brooklyn's Padna. As Padna, Nat Hawks initially made his name in the cassette underground on the revered Stunned label with two works of pop experimentalism displaying a bustling -- often boggling -- and vivid imagination. Veritable joyrides in sound and style, these releases were in line with the DIY aesthetic, primitive songcraft and eclectic sonic stew pioneered by the likes of Tall Dwarfs and forwarded by Olivia Tremor Control, though with an even more exploratory skew. Burnt Offerings is a mellower, simpler counterpart to those earlier works, but still elastic and ever expanding in its peculiar pursuit of the transcendental. Making up its sweet, song-oriented meditations through a hazy circle of intoned psychedelia, drone, bedroom folk and dub filters, these tracks roam from kaleidoscopic melody, slowly loping with a whimsical way to a contrasting, shadowy elegance for murkier intent. Burnt Offerings' oddly charming spectrum -- built on acoustic guitar, vintage synths, electric violin, toys, objects and a dizzying array of effects -- is by turns romantic, melancholic, curious and always full of heart. Burnt Offerings is the sixth and final work in Preservation's limited edition series Preservation called "Circa for 2012." Only 300 copies of each release in the series will be available and will feature a design by Mark Gowing. Each design is realized using an abstract alphabet that creates an interlocking grid, determined by artist and volume number for something both fixed, random and unified across the entire series.

Green Plastic Prism (G.P.P.) - Padna