Sand Circles – Motor City CS

NNF256

This is Martin Herterich’s second pass around the NNF circuit in his Sand Circles hovercraft (following 2011’s Midnight Crimes EP), and though the general schematics and engine design remain the same – aged drum machines, afterhours analog tape echo, faded synth riffs, derelict metropolis atmospheres – Motor City’s grace and execution place it in a superior division to anything else he’s tracked to date. A cool, loner narrative arc plays out across each side too: “Entering Motor City” across “White Sand” wherein there’s a “Downtown Holdup” in the “Innercity Haze,” before cruising back out of the urban sprawl, “Distant Lights” in the rearview, on through the “Endless Nights,” “Descending Into Space.” As with his last tape, the Sand Circles chemistry of transfusing reverb-refracted electronic horizon melodies with pulsing, primitivist warehouse-party drum machinery really succeeds in evoking this weirdly poignant bedroom/industrial reverie mood-sphere, and the 11 instrumentals of Motor City hit this interzone pressure point better than ever. Silver ink on black shells with torched-factory graphic-design J-cards by B Brown. Edition of 150.

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