About

The signs were always there, for anyone who’s cared to hear. Xhin’s heterogeneous sounds always contained the signs of something, somewhere else. The multi-instrumentalist has, over the last two decades, low-key infused his electronic music and mixes with compositional flourishes, ambient touches, and live instrumentation. Finally, The Images Within — less a return to Xhin’s roots than a solo fulfilment of long-held, diverse desires; his true colours — offers an entry into his holistically experimental, analogue, and very human world. Incited by mortality’s harsh confrontation of us, his first album on his own label — The Document — may shock or alienate, but its intensely visual poetry of the medieval and antiquarian, its song cycles between and within genres, its independent core of melancholy and necessary catharsis: they are all, as ever, open to anyone who cares to step in.

Mastered by Christian Wright at Abbey Road Studios, the eight tracks within are akin to a soundtrack in search of a film — something by Villeneuve or Lynch, perhaps, on a double bill with Ōshima or Toshio Matsumoto. Opener “This Is Not The Beginning”, unlike a tabula rasa, does not demolish but builds upon, further expands Xhin’s sound stage. Literally: the undulating static and metallic sheens wildly oscillate between the channels and surround; hints of nonhuman growls may make you check your speakers too. - On Bandcamp