Larsen Unveil New Album ‘Decalcomania’ Alongside Video by Jacopo Benassi
Larsen return with Decalcomania, their twentieth album, out now on Erototox Decodings.
What began as a series of sketches, fragments really, was carried into a more defined shape by William Basinski, whose presence is felt less as a guiding hand and more as a subtle pressure across the surface, stretching time, letting tones hang longer than expected, his saxophone lines threading through a few of the pieces in a way that feels incidental and deliberate at once.
Across five tracks the band move through a loose set of moods, lounge elements dissolving into ambient passages, dub inflections brushing up against quieter electronic forms, all of it held together by that familiar Larsen sensibility which never quite fixes itself in one place, while Little Annie’s lyrics drift across the music with a kind of oblique clarity, suggesting more than they spell out.
The album carries the imprint of several locations without trying to smooth them into a single space, recorded in Torino by Paul Beauchamp, shaped further in Los Angeles by Gary Thomas Wright, and brought to its final form in New York by James Plotkin, each step leaving its own slight shift in atmosphere.
It also marks a point of transition that stays mostly in the background, the first release by Larsen on this label and the last to feature Roberto Maria Clemente, a change that registers more as a quiet realignment than anything declared outright.
A video directed by Jacopo Benassi accompanies the release, working alongside the music rather than illustrating it, another surface pressed into contact and then lifted away, leaving its trace.
Since the mid-nineties the band have built a catalogue shaped by ongoing collaborations,… moving between figures such as Jóhann Jóhannsson and Michael Gira among many others, and ‘Decalcomania’ sits comfortably within that trajectory, neither summing it up nor stepping outside it.
A release show is set for April 16 at Magazzino Sul Po, bringing the record back into a physical space not far from where much of it first took shape.
Headline photo: Anna Benedusi
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