7038634357 (703) "Waterfall Horizon"

Long accustomed to the rhythms of small-batch self-releases, Neo Gibson, who makes music as 7038634357, developed a meticulous mode of craftsmanship on their early albums, which they typically synthesized and recorded solo, seeking formal precision, melodic structure, and an idiosyncratic emotional tenor. But in 2022, on a European tour, Gibson began to feel that their previous work was too inflexibly itself for the aesthetic ethos of live performance; presenting their finely-tuned, studio-crafted work sometimes felt more like playing back audio files than communing with an audience. They wanted to perform a song that was not yet a fully-formed thing, a perfectly smoothed and sanded object-a song that could flow into the audience and come back different in it's echo. While on the road, Gibson began writing with an explicit orientation toward live shows, crafting tracks that were more discrete-rather than seamlessly stitched together-which offered crowds a greater capacity to push and p