Severed+Said

Severed+Said

End Time Loop

Not Not Fun

Floridian synthesist John Touchton aka Severed+Said returns with his most cinematic suite yet of witching hour electronics, spidery rhythm, and macabre clockwork: End Time Loop. A 10-track panorama of “paradise and devastation,” the music moves between sinkholes of low-end, darkened room drones, and strobing percussion, tracing shadows of swamps and derelict blocks. Inspired by the possibilities of a newly acquired hardware sequencer, and composing on headphones, Touchton atomized and re-assembled each song until an “absolute form” revealed itself. His tunnel focus recording method gives the pieces a hermetic precision, mutating and rippling across grid-mapped webs of smoke, mirror, and mirage. Touchton’s youth in a Pentecostal church informs the album’s conflicted themes, a crossroads of “atrocities and kindness,” reckonings and rapture, vestigial dread born of crosses covered in dust. What lurks is what lasts, looping beneath the surface, as unseen as an ill wind. All End Times have their beginning.

Severed+Said

Tragic Seeker

Not Not Fun

John Touchton aka Severed+Said’s third thaumaturgic synth document for NNF, “Tragic Seeker,” deftly conjures the mood and mythos of the Floridian void lurking behind its “eternal shores and menacing skylines.” Conceived and captured across three extended sessions at Jacksonville studio bunker Long Jump Records, the songs were repeated until they refracted, turning liquid and hypnotic.  Drum machinery and spiral synthetics flicker in webs of midnight heat, dry ice, and isolation, simmering at the perimeter of forbidden portals. The album obliquely mirrors the alluring tropical oblivion artwork by native Florida painter Jason Gvvl – both blend mirage with malevolence, attuned to dreamscapes in decay. This is music of glimpses and vanishings, pitfalls and parallels, desire and undoing. To seek is to sink into depths unknown, under horizons still gleaming with the glow of other suns.

Severed+Said

Occlusions

Not Not Fun

Jacksonville, Floridian John Touchton’s second release of ritualistic synthesizer music, Occlusions, is less soundtrack-ish than his last and hugely more sunken. The decision to blast his hardware through a trio of vintage amps before capturing it on the Tascam gives this set of songs a more physical aspect, thick throbs over signal buzz and low corridors of drum machinery. The pieces swerve from mechanical raga (“Black Shine Bright”) to tranced nightrides (“Death By Empire”) to Heathen Earth bass trenches (“Occluded”), but they share a processional heaviness and humid pulse. Six electronic stalker themes from under the shadow of dawn, the glow of gear the only light. Recorded in a warehouse in “the dark corners of Florida” in October, 2014 by Jeremiah Johnson; all instruments by John Touchton. Purple-imprinted silver metallic tapes in doublesided cathode-warp J-cards with images by Phantomphoton; layout and photography by Rebecca Rose.