Mark Solotroff "You May Be Holding Back" CD

Mark Solotroff
"You May Be Holding Back"

CD in 4-panel digipak (sealed in shrinkwrap)

(drone - noise - synth - industrial)

1. A Literal Territory Occupied Literally (30:00)
2. All In The Straw Together (30:00)

(stream below via Bandcamp)

I had planned to release a new album comprised of synth and field recordings later this spring, following some live performances of similar material. Since my first solo show of the year was canceled, due to the pandemic, I decided to record what I had proposed to play live. In fact, I recorded two distinct, but related, pieces. As I've been working on new music this winter and building on my solo work from the last few years, I've been considering the intersection of urban alienation and human desire. For now, this is a digital-only release. (Mark Solotroff, March 2020)

Excerpt of review by Chris Groves/Night Science:

Mark Solotroff’s work is redolent of isolation. ‘You May Be Holding Me Back’ treats field recordings with careful synthesizer infiltration, the sounds of the city kept at bay through “A Literal Territory Occupied Literally” by a thick treatment of billowing synth fog, an insistent dying wind chime, and a slow delay which accents moments of occasional field recording clarity. The claustrophobia is gradual in onset but intense: slivers of Mark’s field recordings emerge as increasingly worrisome moments while the bilious synth coagulates unperturbed, smothering the broader city’s interactions in its cloud. The isolating effect in “All In The Straw Together” is even more intense, the walls having closed in and starting to crawl with visual infestation. The field recordings are barely discernible and the thrum of the city has disappeared, replaced with a multi-layered haze of vibrating high end hallucinating and cyclic mid-toned insomnia. “All In The Straw Together” doesn’t pretend isolation is loneliness; rather, isolation manifests as apparitional disturbance wrapped around a depressed core, flickering in and out of reality as images of the chaos outside manifest as self-isolated mania.