Jacob Becker - "Lotus"

Drawing from equal parts Animal Collective / Black Dice at their most sedated and druggiest as well as the nightmare version of “Pure Moods” new age compositions, Jacob Becker’s latest album Pure Thoughts on Ex-official. From the press release, "Lotus" is the lead single off of Jacob Becker's sophomore album, Pure Thoughts. 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 enh”ance and care for our weirdness and mutability, rather than to whittle ourselves down into commodities. “