"There are people who stumble into sound the way certain rivers find the sea, People Skills belongs to that happy camp of bedroom dreamers. Since the mid 2000s he's been pulling repetitive guitar figures, idle tape phenomena, sound residue and deep buried vocals into forms that feel hallucinated rather than composed. His Heresy Museum locale the ship by which these vexed transmissions sail. Sunken, yet somehow floating, paced with the tide, surprising, and sitting just outside both the listener and it seems the artist himself. For years, his late father's untrained photography has completed the fractured scene, pulling two parallel streams of private evidence toward the same unknown, and this document sticks to the same shadowy form.
Nine pieces, no unnecessary movement. The trademark Discreet's "beauty and grit" sit side by side throughout. The opening eleven minute epic, "Four Curling Corners of Your Soul", gently kicks this door open with the sound of an approaching storm trapped inside a ballad. What follows, beyond a reportedly "tart nod at Bataille on Lascaux”, is a guitar album like a refrigerator cycling through signals from a distant shortwave station. Lost instruments circling themselves without urgency. Voices drift in and out, in and out. Rooms of the cave open into other rooms that open into other rooms... Before long, the distinction between the foreground and the myth of its imagery stops mattering entirely. Anyone still talking about "lo-fi aesthetics" in 2026 can safely be ignored. This music concertedly sits outside category. It moves nearby a strain of homemade music that values intuition over intention, happy accidents over polish and patient repetition over hurried destination, and Aaens belongs to that world, but he seems to have arrived there without consulting the guidebook or the tired committees forever gesturing at its containment."
- J.T.D. Cusamano
Photographs from the Alfred P. Sebastian Archives 1969 - 1995
The Sculptor written and recorded 2016, the rest performed and recorded by Jesse Dewlow in winter 2024 - 2025 in Philadelphia, PA
Mixed, compiled and completed by Samael B. Aaens summer 2026 in Vilnius, LT
Mastered by Lasse Marhaug
Edition of 300 copies. Printed kraftboard covers with paste-on artwork and insert.
Discreet Music 35, 2026