“Cover art is a composite of 32 images. Music was recorded 2020-2023, various equipment & locations in SF. Some of it mirrors the visual design, pieces of songs reassembled into new forms, exploring my language in sound.”
The entrancing hypnagogic club work of Vaguetracks and its founder Raven has been on our radar since last summer, but I didn’t see the artist perform live until this past January. Up in the nook at Underground SF on a Friday night—at the time you would already expect higher tempos to be lighting up the place—Raven started out slow, patiently sculpting ambient waves to a fully present, receptive crowd. Over the course of an hour, the beat came in and pumped harder and harder, until the dance party was fully lit, but always retaining that dreamy, unreal feeling.
This slow, morphing ambient techno journey experienced live that night is reimagined exquisitely in the latest Vaguetracks full-length release, Encoded Language by Jade Snake. Beginning in a beatless step staircase of peaceful synth and ultimately landing in a deeply satisfying lofi house reverie, the new album twists and curls through a wide composition of club and post-club sounds, expressing a rich techno poetry all along the way.
