Pure Thoughts, by Jacob Becker

Pure Thoughts

by Jacob Becker

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Packaged in a jewel case with 4-panel insert. Artwork and design by Brandon Wilson

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1.	Lotus 04:05	buy track
2.	Presense 03:13	buy track
3.	Saratoga Park 05:24	buy track
4.	Pathwayz 05:13	buy track
5.	Lair 07:56	buy track
6.	Reemerge 05:24	buy track
7.	Terminas 04:57	buy track
8.	Freedom in a Complex Society 08:07	buy track

about

"Pure Thoughts" is the second release of New York musician Jacob Becker. The album engages with themes of nature, artificiality, and alienation, balancing apocalyptic meltdowns with hints of a path through the destruction. Continuing a compositional practice centered around highly processed sampling, the album is composed solely of manipulated recordings of acoustic guitar and voice.

A critical nod to the classic New Age compilation series "Pure Moods," the work surfaces a latent tension within a genre that framed “back to nature” rhetoric against a backdrop of financialized ecological abuse. Initially conceived of as a joke about making a healthy, natural, and organic album–an “unplugged” record–this basic irony became a meditation on how we preoccupy ourselves with ideas of purity and health while despoiling the planet and exploiting each other.

Working only with a cheap acoustic guitar and his voice, the raw materials for the record were created by a slapdash, intuitive process: screaming into microphones, playing the guitar with a handheld fan, and other obtuse tactics. The results were then further distorted by being digitally forced into musical shape. Using Auto-Tune to “instrumentalize” the artist’s untrained voice, the music is a détournement of high-tech tools of refinement, suggesting that our world-altering capabilities should be used to enhance and care for our weirdness and mutability, rather than to whittle ourselves down into commodities.

credits

released September 22, 2023

Recording, composing, producing by Jacob Becker. Artwork, design and video by Brandon Wilson. Mixing by Joshua Wilson. Mastering by Anne Taegert (of Dubplates & Mastering).

Copyright © 2023 Ex-Official. All rights reserved.

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Jacob Becker New York, New York

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