HUERCO S
Sounds that speak to an altered state of home
music that makes you question your mind
sonic pallette of
recontextualisation
Fueled by an ethos less bound by genre and more bound by feeling, Brian Leeds makes music for the mind and for the floor, finding lost artifacts and carving out sounds that speak to an altered state of home, or place. Music that plays tricks on your brain, music that makes you question or surrender your mind, music very much rooted in audio archaeology and personal exploration. Coming out from playing punk and metal bands as a teenager in Kansas,
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Brian picked up dance music as “it was the opposite of what I’d been involved with for so long. I wanted something more tangible, less abrasive and more sensual ”.
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His fast-evolving works as Huerco S - released on Software, Proibito, Opal Tapes, and Future Times worked with a sonic palette of recontextualisation, low fidelity, and a subtle sense of humor long missing from the genre. The hazy and insistent fug of samples and synths on his debut album Colonial Patterns blurred the lines between the dance floor and liminal space, with tracks as likely to clang about your head like prolonged accusations as much as they would dissolve into steam.
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"Challenging an uncertain,
but welcoming feeling"
His later ambient works, both as Huerco S and as Pendant, marked a shift away from the club and into a smeared landscape with no clear horizon, channelling an uncertain, but welcoming feeling: neither dread nor relaxation, but somewhere in between, abstracting and arranging rhythm into oblivion.
rhythm into oblivion
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For Those Of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have) expanded on the meditative qualities of his work through beatless excursions into the inner depths of the mind, while Make Me Know You Sweet was described by Boomkat as channelling “a latent, esoteric vein of American spirituality [that] is only divined by those who remain open minded to its effect”.
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These feelings have been further developed on his label, West Mineral Ltd., whose stated aim is “to release everything except for commonly accepted, traditional forms of late 20th / early 21st century dance music”. The releases sometimes stay in this same beatless space, and other times reaching blistering tempos, riding waves of emotion and descending into calming spaces that sound frenetic and neurotic, but allow the mind to wander while in the dance. Esoteric excursions for esoteric times, fueled by a production method and ethos based on “always digging through the mud, re-assembling,
& re-contextualizing”.
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Website: www.westmineral.ltd
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