Ben Billington has devoted a decade of his life to Chicagos overlapping scenes of experimental DIY, electronic music, and free jazz as a part of seminal outfits including Tiger Hatchery, ONO, and ADT. His solo music under the Quicksails moniker compresses his mastery of synthesis and percussion into dense electro- acoustic compositions animated by stacked layers of rhythm and alien texture. Mortal, his first LP for Hausu Mountain, finds Quicksails piecing together some of his most complex compositions to date, steering his network of synths, samplers, and acoustic instruments through conflicting emotional territories as a means of personal catharsis and abstracted self expression. Each track on Mortal presents its own mosaic of juxtaposed textures and moods, as electronic and acoustic elements swell together into short narrative arcs. Lush polyphonic synth lines clash or collude over basslines that trudge through the nether regions of the mix. Massive saxophone and trumpet fanfares (performed by Billingtons ADT bandmates Carlos Chavarria and Jake Acosta) weave through layers of complementary electronic melody. Busy percussion lines sound out from drum kit, hand percussion, and drum machine, smearing together into a rhythmic bedrock that blurs the line between the synthetic and the organic. Quicksails composed Mortal during a year of intense personal upheavals, and he presents the album as a series of obliquely diaristic sketches coded with the emotional residue of real life events. Quicksails optimism and joyfulness shines through in each tracks baroque construction and inevitably redemptive climax. He finds room in his compositions for untold layers of acoustic instrumentation, from tabla to gong to gamelanlike chimes, which achieve a form of reverse synthesis by becoming nearly indistinguishable from his electronics. Meanwhile, his synth patches pound out and burst with the attack and the finegrained textures of acoustic percussion, or blend seamlessly in electroacoustic bliss with sax and trumpet leads.
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