Bleep

Tom Krell returns as How To Dress Well with his fifth album The Anteroom, featuring co-production from OPN collaborator Joel Ford. Intended to be played as a single continuous piece, The Anteroom rightly reclaims the experimental core of the HTDW project.

Throughout its thirteen track duration, Krell moves from rigid experiments within house and techno toward more softcore zingers that relay stories from the most knotted corners of human life, all translating in to a very 21st-century form of psychedelic music. Said to be inspired by the experimental underground pillars from Coil and Prurient to the foggy techno of Gas, The Anteroom at once reclaims the experimental edginess of the earliest Tri Angle recordings by How To Dress Well, yet also sees Tom Krell moving far away from his run of R&B-influenced records that have followed since. This continued journey from the light was in part inspired by his move to Los Angeles which Krell describes as "a crazy and maybe dreadful place", a landscape in which he slipped out of the world and into 'a cosmic loneliness in which he would eventually be dissolved'. It was these spaces in between that How To Dress Well began to understand his station as some kind of anteroom, viewing the studio as 'a chamber that separates the known and the unknown, stable life from total disintegration'. From the blizzardous electronic noise of 'False Skull 7', the fragile melodies of the Croation Amor reference 'Love Means Taking Action' and the poignant poetry at the heart of 'Nonkilling 13 | Ceiling for the Sky', The Anteroom is sure to see How To Dress Well finding new admirers within the bleeding off-the-edge-sound of Prurient Bermuda Drain-era (minus the screams), the love-lorn and lost pop of Croatian Amor and the otherworldly soul of serpentwithfeet and Yves Tumor...

While The Anteroom gives us many familiarities of How To Dress Well, it kits them out in an entirely different and freshly clothed light.