About

"Monolithic and stark but extremely warm, intensely personal, and for every one in every which way. " - Label

Brian Leeds, best known as Huerco S., is no stranger to exploration. Long before his name became synonymous with modern ambient music, Leeds referred to himself as a collagist—unearthing and recontextualizing sonic artifacts into cohesive tapestries, mining the past for clues to the present. A sort of musical archeologist, his work has never followed the beaten path. Instead, Leeds has chosen time and again to veer off trail, pushing the boundaries of his sound into realms that feel both familiar and alien, wringing out buried textures and emotions and giving them new life.

At the core of his artistry lies an irrefutable authenticity, a willingness to be himself and nothing else. Much of this he owes to his upbringing in rural Kansas, where he first developed the friendships that comprise his now prolific West Mineral Ltd. label. There, far removed from major cultural hubs, he was forced to conjure a sonic vision that recontextualized and reimagined dance music as he saw fit.

Leeds established the moniker Huerco S. in 2010 as a response to the leftfield sounds emanating from the margins of the dance floor. His early releases, Untitled and Colonial Patterns, became precursors to the emergence of lo-fi house in the mid 2010s. By the time DJ Boring released “Winona” in 2016, Huerco S. had moved even further from the dance floor with his seminal ambient album For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have). Received with positive critical acclaim, the album situated Leeds at the center of a reemerging ambient scene. But that never sat quite right with him. In a 2017 interview with the Miami New Times, Leeds said, “I really just wanted to make something soothing for my own needs, and from this developed a bit of a narrative.” — (via Resident Advisor)

Kansas City producer Huerco S.'s second album is ambient music through and through—though it’s informed by a memory of club music, which hangs over it like a ringing in the ears.

The Kansas City producer Huerco S. put out his first release in 2012, when he was just 21 years old, and though its structures loosely hewed to the tenets of house and techno, he hadn’t yet spent much time in dance clubs. It was a fantasy of club music, a perspective schooled by records and YouTube and hearsay, and whatever it lacked in polish, it more than made up for in its suggestiveness. Like a secret whispered in your ear while standing too close to the sound system, it was all the more exciting for the parts of the transmission that were garbled, or simply lost, on their journey from his machines to our ears.

In places, Huerco S. seems to be nodding to systems musicians—experimental composers who use generative processes to create the work—and folding their ideas back into a more soothingly repetitive framework. The drifting “Hear Me Out” recalls the burnished bell tones of Oval’s 94diskont; the smeared and indistinct qualities of the album’s palette suggests the influence of Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room,” a 1969 composition for voice and magnetic tape that dissolved the physical world into a spectral hum. On the opening “A Sea of Love,” you can just barely make out the outline of the patiently looping synthesizer melody; its contours are all but worn away, and you almost wonder if there’ll be anything left of it in another dozen listens.

That’s absurd, of course. This isn’t a dubplate, or a record made of ice; it’s a piece of wax and a bundle of 1s and 0s, and it'll stay this way as long as there are playback devices to play it on. But part of the album's magic is the way that Huerco S., after the fashion of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, has captured a feeling of fragility, of things flaking to dust before our very eyes and ears.

There’s only one thing to break the reverie, and that’s the musician's curious habit of finishing his songs by simply cutting them off in mid-swirl. It happens again and again, on “On the Embankment,” “Marked for Life,” “Cubist Camouflage,” “Promises of Fertility”—all of the record’s C- and D-side tracks but one, in fact. It’s a strange tactic: Here you are, blissfully immersed in this amniotic bubble of sound, and then—nothing, just a silence so abrupt it feels like waking up on cold cement. He does it so often that it has to mean something. The closest that I can figure is it’s a way of acknowledging that these objects of trans-human beauty could easily go on forever; to fade out would be a kind of illusion, a lie. By cutting them off in mid-stream, and sacrificing the experience in the process, Huerco S. is simply living up to a purist ideal. I’m not sure it works, ultimately, but you've got to admire his gumption. It’s a kind of tough love, essentially—a hard-headed approach absolutely in keeping with the history of Midwestern techno, no matter how downy the music itself. And anyway, there’s always the repeat button.  — (via Pitchfork)

↓
Label: Proibito
Format: 2 x Vinyl, LP
Reissued: 2025 / Original release: 2016
Genre: Electronic
Style: Ambient, Experimental

File under: Electronic // Ambient
⦿