Chicago-based guitarist Trevor Shelley de Brauw (Pelican, RLYR) is streaming his first solo album – a collection of power-ambient compositions entitled Uptown – today on Noisey. Due out February 10th on San Francisco’s acclaimed experimental label The Flenser, Uptown is a stream of consciousness sustained for too long, an aural pendulum swinging between poles of murky distress and cathartic resolve that takes shape somewhere in the hazy valleys between rock, ambient and experimental music.
Trevor Shelley de Brauw’s 20 year musical career has manifested as an exploration of the vast sonic possibilities of the guitar. Uptown marks a departure from the riff-oriented song writing of Pelican, taking a plaintive approach that unravels the meditative depth of washed-out riffs, deconstructed drones, and carefully controlled feedback. The album delves into complex dimensions of deeply layered textures: an evocation of haunting melodicism that shares more common ground with Brian Eno’s ambient work and drone wizards Barn Owl than it does a metal record. Written and recorded over the span of nearly a decade, Uptown represents a scrapbook from a formative era in de Brauw’s life, bookended by a stint on a remote tobacco farm in North Carolina and his return to the anxiety-ridden urban eccentricities of Chicago’s historic Uptown neighborhood.
The Chicago-based guitarist will play a record release show on February 10th in Chicago at The Empty Bottle with The Life and Times and Storm Clouds and more information on that can be found here.
Uptown will be out this Friday and is available for pre-order here.
Uptown Track Listing:
1. A New Architecture
2. Distinct Frequency
3. They Keep Bowing
4. You Were Sure
5. Turn Up For What
6. From The Black Soil Poetry and Song Sprang
