Continuing the re-emergence of Bristol's Subtext label, former Vex'd artist Roly Porter presents his debut solo album Aftertime. This LP fuses his background in bleeding edge British sound system music with experimental compositional strategies and a forensic attention to sound design. The results explore the terrain of an emerging industrial classical aesthetic, connecting new approaches to digital manipulation and processing with the instrumentation of chamber music in an immersive exploration of texture and tonality. The album connects the dots between the legacy of Dubstep and seminal Jungle labels such as Metalheadz and Full Cycle whilst absorbing aspects of noise, drone and contemporary classical.

Haunting angular assaults crafted across the eleven tracks create a logical postscript to Porter's roots in Vex'd, the seminal Dubstep project launched in 2004, that adopted the tropes of bass production and sonic detailing inherent in sound system culture and translated them into a highly atmospheric dark ambient progression.

Aftertime radiates a central narrative tension between themes of nature and technology, the ancient and modern, and the real and synthetic, revealing a compulsive cinematic netherworld. A communiqué from an earth ravaged by science. The use of instrumentation, in particular the haunting tones of the Ondes Martenot (performed here by Cynthia Millar) reflects Porter's fascination with rare and dying technologies, the Martenot being playable by only a remaining handful of performers. Placing this rare instrument's eerie aesthetics alongside muscular sheets of noise and heavily machined tones, the album maps out a compositional territory that chronicles a dying sonic language whilst ushering in the dawning of the new.

At the outer edges of this map, Aftertime stands as a re-imagined present - an apparition of a mythologised past and an unreachable future.



All tracks written and produced by Roly Porter
Except Caladan by Roly Porter & Max Porter
Ondes Martenot & Dulcitone performed by Cynthia Millar
Viola performed by Phil Owen
Violin performed by Geoff Wright
Cello performed by Rhiannon Chaloner
String Recording by Paul Jebanasam
Mastering by James Ginzburg at Multiverse
Additional Mastering by Mat Sampson

Published by Multiverse Media Publishing
Manufactured and Distributed by Cargo Records
Design by John Coulthart
Faster Than Sound Photography by Jana Chiellino

Released in September 2011