Fosil Sangiran

Fosil Sangiran is the pseudonym for Seattle polymath Matt Shoemaker (1974-2017). The two recordings that have been uncovered from his archives under this moniker were recorded during a lengthy sabbatical in Java, Indonesia between 2012 and 2013. Though these works both operate very clearly within Shoemaker’s aesthetic, he choose to operate under this moniker to provide a clarifying distance from what he believed to be his commonplace birth name. Sangiran refers to the UNESCO world heritage site in Indonesia where numerous archeological discoveries have been made providing insight into the understanding of early human development. It’s an apt metaphor to his churning arrays of psychotropic sound design, which give the allusion of being distressed from aeons of jungle rot. 
 
Pasar Fosil is classic Shoemaker. At the core to this album is an ur-drone sculpted from electro-acoustics, analog synthesis, and most probably a radically altered eld recording here or there. All of these accretions of sustained tone organize themselves with a rhizomatic logic of recombinant twists, folds, and mutations. Elegant harmonics with golden, clarion hues set the stage to this album, but Shoemaker would never allow for any his compositions to merely stand as polite ambient music. No. He deftly introduces sheared metallic timbres and rasping dissonance that tug with a gravitational heft. By the second half of the album, Shoemaker plunges into aural thickets that are openly hostile to the listener, articulated through allusions to a humid claustrophobia and radioactive toxicity. Even compared to the muscular minimalism of Organum, Pasar Fosil is unsettling as it is exquisite. 
 
These two posthumous recordings celebrate the life and art of Matt Shoemaker who took his own life in 2017. The release of these albums coincides with an exhibition of his work at the Jack Straw Cultural Center in Seattle, Washington from April 13 to May 18, 2018. A memorial concert in Matt’s honor will be held at the Chapel Performance Space also in Seattle, with performances by Climax Golden Twins, Jim Haynes, Colin Andrew Shef eld, and Dave Knott on May 5, 2018. 
 
Published with the approval of the Shoemaker family. All pro ts will be donated to the Jack Straw Cultural Center.