The Night Gallery present: SEHT Live

“Seht crafts ultra subtle drone atmospheres and spectral ambient scapes” – Boomkat.com

Stephen Clover is a musician, artist and social commentator, and is associated with a long line of great Kiwi underground music acts such as The Dead C and Birchville Cat Motel. He plays as a bassist in The Stumps, and runs his own record label Palindrone. But what he is best known for is his solo “minimalist ambient and layered drone” electronica project Seht.

For those unfamiliar with drone electronica, it is music that blends the boundaries of synthesizer pop with noise. Clover samples sounds from hundreds of sources, and then blends long, mesmerising tracks that take the listener on a journey. Rose Miller, producer of the weekly alternative music podcasts At Home With Rose calls it “music for the mind.”

The first Seht album was released in 2001, and seventeen releases later came the latest HRRY, released in 2009. HRRY has been very well received by music reviewers.

Stephen Clover has always blazed along similar trails as giants such as Tony Conrad, Eno, and Olivier Messiaen. That being said, none of it prepared us for the leap forward he took on his first ever vinyl release, HRRY.

While some artists struggle to make music that is wholly avant-garde and still approachable and listenable, Clover avoids those pitfalls masterfully. HRRY is in exercise in the use of crackling electronics, minimal beats, computer manipulation and solid-state drones. Each track slowly progresses as they build off each other and form a sprawling conglomeration of tones. Its as if youre stuck in a post-apocalyptic dreamworld where industrial giants are fighting back against the warm, relentless elegance of nature. Even though the arsenal Clover is using is as unnatural as it gets, the music on HRRY displays such an innate organicness that its almost confusing. From the computerized voice of ERKK to the throbbing beat of SPFT, its as though hes gone so far into the mechanical, man-made world that hes come all the way to the other side.

HRRY is a dark album that is glazed with a sense of hope. Echoes of the ghosts of Basinski ride through these ambient rivers, trying to find new forms of electronic music. Its music for the second coming... of what' An era where all the rotting buildings and shades of grey breathe new life into the elemental ashes of fallen empires.

- Foxy Digitalis, http://www.foxydigitalis.com/digiv004.html

For Hrry Seht crafts ultra subtle drone atmospheres and spectral ambient scapes, at times coming across like a mumbled Messiaen, a darker cousin to Eno or the perfect bedfellow for the recent Leyland Kirby series. Spooked drum machines underpin much of the A-side, slowing the rhythms until they sound like approaching footsteps or a full sunken and quasi-speed version of industrial techno like Zharks Kareem reworked by Oren Ambarchi. Here, organ notes are held with the meditative quality of someone who can slow their pulse to the bare minimum, until theyre stretched so far a guttural subbass underbelly is required to fill the vacuum of grey space. The B-side largely abandons the rhythmic framework for five much shorter yet expansive compositions, craftily mixing alien sounds across the audio field while moving to different scenes of cinematic narrative, from archaic silent movie drama to dystopian sci-fi abstraction, recalling the paranoid feel of Philip K. Dick, or maybe imagining Darren Aronofsky working with Stars Of The Lid instead of The Kronos Quartet. This is music built with a rarified, unsettling and subtly spectral quality in mind that late night listeners will find hard to separate from the ambient drones of fridges, traffic and computers, blurring the distinctions between his reality and yours.

- Boomkat http://boomkat.com/vinyl/237844-seht-hrry


The Night Gallery is a series of live performances and film screening events run by the Depot Artspace at their Satellite Gallery space in Newton, Auckland.