MINOR SCIENCE - Absent Friends Vol. III

"Minor Science -- aka UK-born, Berlin-based musician Angus Finlayson -- makes his Balmat debut with Absent Friends Vol. III, the third installment in a shape-shifting series across a variety of formats and platforms. And with it, he pushes forward his vision of ambient music as neither static vista or merely mood-setting atmosphere, but rather a dynamic matrix of textures, sensations, and even rhythms. The first two Absent Friends -- a 2014 set for Blowing Up the Workshop, and a 2017 cassette and web player for Whities (now AD93) -- were hybrid affairs, part DJ mix and part collage, mostly featuring music made by other people. Then, in 2020-21, Finlayson developed the project into a live show of his own material. Armed with hundreds of bespoke stems created in his studio -- idiosyncratic FX chains, feedback loops through cheap rack gear, heavily post-processed field recordings, found voices, etc. -- he would improvise on four CDJs, mixer, FX, and live synths, extending techniques he l