Bleep

South African born and currently Providence Rhode Island based, clocolan presents his new full length Empathy Alpha via the artist's own Redpan imprint.

With previous releases that have explored the concepts of memory and the collapse of ecosystems, clocolan aka Emlyn Ellis Addison strides out on a solo cerebral voyage this outing, taking in a rich palette highlighted with accents of 70s science fiction riding high on dense modular alpha waves.

Continuing the narrative focus of his previous albums, Empathy Alpha casts its analytical gaze on the human mind and the damaged psyche this time, via the lense of sci-fi psychoanalysis. Linked together by several sections of dialogue lifted from films that don't exist. The fields of synth tone are given shape via a therapist taking a baseline test with a young patient: "Can you see me? Can you see my blue eyes?" "You tried to hurt yourself, can you tell me what you feel?", the mangled final emergency broadcast from deep space: "This is my 81st transmission" "So I decided rescue is impossible" "Everyone in the command crew forgot what happened" and later, the weathered voice of an old man, perhaps the same person, describing a cataclysmic event: "The event.... the reaction....was beyond anything we could have known." "Our minds were unequipped." "Endlessly obliterated."

Though disparate, the confessional narrative that joins these tellings is an unburdening, a sharing of a great weight that points towards the albums namesake, in each instance tensely soundtracked by clocolans deeply cinematic soundscapes.

Seemingly beamed in as if via projection from the control deck of a mangled alien craft or the recordings from a long dormant android, Empathy Alpha feels like a holobroadcast for our ears. Rendered in three dimensional clarity but still ghostly, ephemeral and asking the same questions: Who am I? Where am I? How did I get here?