Front Matter Dead Souls

by Semka

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1.	Envy 2020 03:15	buy track
2.	Secret Sadness of the 21st Century 06:39	buy track
3.	Solo Skit 02:04	buy track
4.	Technic Angel (w/ Tapiwa Svosve) 03:28	buy track
5.	Front Matter Dead Souls 05:06	buy track
6.	Attack Angel (w/ Maria) 03:40	buy track
7.	Thunderdrome Exclusive 03:07	buy track
8.	Darkstar 02:55	buy track

about

Semka (aka Sem Lala)’s Front Matter Dead Souls is an examination of affect as a construction. A composite of found sounds and field recordings, the New York-based Albanian artist’s album of process-based noise, ambient, and musique concrète sound design ploughs the shallow depths of artifice in this intensely evocative experiment in manufacturing emotion. Eight textured tracks are arranged in a coarse patchwork of sonic elements that exposes the music for its own illusory meaning.

Whether in the stormy environmental sounds and scrambled orchestral echoes on “Thuderdome Exclusive” or the crisp spoken word sample-pack stems on “Secret Sadness of the 21st Century,” Front Matter Dead Soul insists on the artificiality of how feelings are conveyed in art by divorcing it from its source. And yet, this very rejection of music as anything but an instrument of inducement, is what makes Lala’s work so deeply intimate, and, paradoxically, authentic.

Born in Elbasan and for a time residing in Zürich, Lala co-founded the Czarnagora label in the aforementioned Swiss city, releasing music under his Jon Neverdie alias, along with other artists like Jan Vorisek and Tapiwa Svosve. The latter saxophonist—perhaps best known for a recent collaboration with Asma Maroof and Patrick Belaga—appears on the groaning clatter of Lala’s “Technic Angel.” Tobias Koch features under the Maria moniker on the collision of “Attack Angel.” That Swiss composer, in turn, has presented Lala’s audio works on his own As we leave the window open sound art platform, with one such release—Diversity and Inclusion Course Work (Stems)—critiquing the didactic representation of semantic conflicts in educational training. That piece echoes the similarly profound ambivalence of Front Matter Dead Souls, where its name alludes to the emptiness of its own veneer—a surface promise of substance concealing a lifeless void beneath.

credits

released September 20, 2023

Mixed by Tobias Koch
Mastered by Rashad Becker

Photography by Virginia Ariu
Design by Niels Wehrspann

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Semka New York, New York

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