Impermanence by The Floating World

"While there is some respite throughout, namely the warm ambience of Endless – Halcyon – Nothing, the rumbling synth drone of Immaterial Existences and the electric jolt of A Dislocation create an unsettling milieu where Votta thrives. A setting seemingly inspired by the vortex, smudged with black and whites that collide for something that is relentless, greyscale noise."
Simon Kirk, Sun13
https://sun-13.com/2024/08/28/the-floating-world-interview-theres-something-about-places-that-i-find-very-haunting/

What are we when the familiar falls away and we have to relearn where we are and find a way through? Impermanence, the 7th album in The Floating World’s (Amanda Votta) 20-year history, was recorded during the late winter-summer of 2020, when all the world had stopped to mitigate a new plague. The rush of city life, the noise, the voices, had gone quiet and a stillness hung over everything, eerie in its departure from the usual. Until that silence was broken by other events, an inescapable reminder that even amid everything else, there is and can be no peace while we live under an oppressive, exploitative system that values some life over others. The hushed streets then filled with fierce resistance, and the inevitable violent state response to people who refuse to be devalued. Other events—people lost to the thing we were so careful to avoid, and the beginnings of a decline—coincided with this period of necessary isolation.

Impermanence departs from The Floating World’s previous, more abstractly inspired music to consider the broad and particular effects of the undoing of time, plans, hopes, dreams, ambitions, desires, stability, memory, relationships, in the face of sudden and sometimes violent disruption. With Impermanence, Amanda tried to map a journey into those disruptions. Not to make them make sense, but to acknowledge them, to learn to live alongside them. To remember that some things should never be forgotten.

Amanda is joined by longtime collaborator Grey Malkin (The Hare and the Moon, Widow's Weeds), who also records with her on new project Deep Fade. Roy K. Felps (Korperschwache) added noisy guitar to “a dislocation.”

Sound sources include digital synthesis, deconstructed, degraded, distorted field recordings of factories, empty and animated city streets, voices, broken and detuned guitars, glass, metal, storms.

CDs available at fiadh.bandcamp.com

Amanda Votta and sometimes Grey Malkin, who also collaborate as Deep Fade. Sometimes a storm, other times a gentle breeze.

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