| Format: | LP |
| Availability: | PRE-ORDER |
For thirty years, Dunn has been the person other people call. He came up in the Seattle scene of the 1990s and went on to build the sound of records by Sunn O))), Wolves in the Throne Room, Marissa Nadler and Thurston Moore, and to produce and co-compose the score of Panos Cosmatos's Mandy alongside the late Jóhann Jóhannsson. This one is his own, and it begins from a problem rather than a sound.
In February 1974 Philip K. Dick had an experience he called an anamnesis, a "loss of forgetfulness," a sort of spiritual awakening. He spent the rest of his life trying to describe it, and in a 1977 lecture at Metz, "If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others," he arrived at the phrase that gives this album its title: "a manifold of partially actualized realities lying tangent to what evidently is the most actualized one, the one which the majority of us, by consensus gentium, agree on." Dunn took that as a compositional foil, a way to deal with time and with his own position in it. "What we do in the future can actually affect the past," he says. "At any given moment, time is leaking into the present."
So nothing here is treated as a finished object. Each composition is one version, one actualization among the several that could have occurred and that go on occurring, on the same piece of tape or the same file. Phrases, motifs and sounds recur across the four tracks like fragments leaked from other timelines. They are never quoted exactly, never resolved, bleeding tangent to whatever piece happens to be playing.
What leaks in is Dunn's own history. The echoes are of jazz and strings, of a remembered gig or a session from a long career spent behind the glass, run back through loopers, electronic processing and translation until they degrade into something else. Side A opens with the twelve-minute "The Ultimate and Universal Ash," Theo Espy's violin, Henry Fraser's bass and Izaak Mills's alto and bass flute moving through a bed of Korg MonoPoly, MS-20 and Moog Taurus. The record closes on "Ayn" (عين), its largest ensemble: Cyro Baptista on percussion and berimbau, Briggan Krauss on alto saxophone, Ben Greenberg on guitar, Fraser on bass, and the voices of Charmaine Lee and Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe over PPG Wave, Juno-60 and CS-80.
Between them sit the record's two spoken pieces, each read by someone who shaped Dunn at a different point in his life. Jim Jarmusch, whose band SQÜRL Dunn produced in 2023, reads Philip K. Dick on "We Larger Ones We None of Us." Laima Leyton reads Robert Graves on "Divine Invasion." Both poems circle time and what it does to us — erosion and refinement at once.
"Enjoy listening to the realities," Dunn writes in his notes for the album. "This is my version of science fiction music."