Hugo Race: Between Hemispheres

Release date: 05.10.09 by Gusstaff Records, Poland. UK Distribution: Baked Goods

Setting aside Hugo’s past with the Melbourne post-punk scene and the Bad Seeds in the eighties, and his solo work in the nineties with the True Spirit collective, over the last decade he has continued to release a steady stream of his songs internationally as well as collaborative projects such as Dirtmusic, Sepiatone, Merola Matrix and Transfargo to an expanding global audience.

Taking its cue from the instrumental electronica of We Create Tomorrow (Reprise), the closing track of 2007’s ‘53rd State’ album, comes the new Hugo Race release ‘Between Hemispheres’. This instrumental album contains no human voices – instead, raw acoustic instruments are pitted against sculpted analogue sounds in a vast organic space both dramatic and meditative, brutal yet beautiful. Here the delta blues remains – but distantly, like background radiation.

Recorded in Africa, Europe and Australia, Between Hemispheres carries references to Hugo’s work with Transfargo (the instrumental ‘Mil Transit’ album from 2004), and the experimentalism of the True Spirit’s ‘Wet Dream’ and ‘Ambuscado’. Using the African string instruments ngone and kora against a stark background of analogue synth, digital pulses, deep space radio signals and widescreen guitar, Race composes a dreamlike experience that echoes his own songwriting.

A trip into the glacial interstice between quantum and digital, these interdimensional meditations traverse the synapse between the left and right sides of the brain, between thought and expression, between two oscillating magnetic poles - between hemispheres.

www.helixed.net www.myspace.com/hugorace


Cover art painted by Michelangelo Russo.
Guest artist - Pantaleimon.
Mastered by Jacaczek.
Produced by Hugo Race for Helixed 2009.