#umorrex

There’s a bold clarity that Tristan Bath applies to the music he makes as Missing Organs. Not just sonic clarity - though certainly the production is sharp and crisp - but clarity of thought and vision, such that each track has a distinct purpose and a traceable path. It would be easy to blur music like this with washes of drone or layers of noise, and that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. But Bath never lets himself hide behind obscuring textures or vague abstractions. His ideas and blueprints are all out in the open, ready for scrutiny and more than strong enough to hold up to it.

Almost everything on Old Speakers is oriented around a beat and a few intertwined melodic lines, and yet the connections between tracks is more of an aura than any kind of literal recurring motifs. It all feels like part of a sonic solar system, but each individual planet has its own orbit. Which means that some songs sound as comfortable and reliable as a conventional movie score, and other can surprise you more the more you listen. Either way, Old Speakers holds attention, slicing through your mental haze with the precision of a knife.

– Marc Masters

TRISTAN BATH on Old Speakers

Leaving my birthplace and capital city - centre of a long dead empire and plaything of the rich - was not entirely by choice. I’m an economic migrant and a spoilt millennial, unable to afford the life I think I want, unable to pay the rent in the city where I was born. My possessions were easy to pack: handfuls of music gear, laptop, clothes, an armful of tapes. As the year went on, I snatched iPhone recordings more often, only for seconds at a time. The crunch of giant rusty engines on a ferry between Canary Islands became the noisy bed of ‘Guanche’. The last moans of a violin I could never really play anyway and threw away before moving for the start of ‘Blood Factory’. The rustle of trees on a hike through Austrian mountains formed the backing of ‘Bridges’. Hours of refinement and toying with ideas began to reflect the change that was happening in my own life. My homeland had abandoned me - although to be fair I abandoned her first. This is the first time I made the music I imagined: noisy, rhythmic, colourful, there’s even a guitar solo in there somewhere. I could only change how I worked after increasingly travelling Europe. I realised that like the people in charge of my country, my old perceptions had outgrown their use and become no clear representation of the reality they presumed to represent - like some rusty old speakers.