Written and produced by Evan Caminiti, featuring electronics by Lisa McGee.
Mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri at Black Knoll Studios.
Artwork by Michael Vallera and Zane Morris.
Vinyl cut at Dubplates and Mastering Berlin.

Distributed by Morr Music (EU) and Forced Exposure (US)

Evan Caminiti

Varispeed Hydra

DE005

Worldwide release date: April 3, 2020

Los Angeles based artist Evan Caminiti returns with the follow up to 2017’s Toxic City Music.

Living in the wrong timeline, dreaming of possible utopias; Varispeed Hydra beams in like a collection of broken transmissions, terrestrial sounds melting into the abstract and rising again as vaporous spectres. Three years in the making, Hydra was recorded utilizing a variety of electroacoustic processes and honed in live performances ranging from the sound art setting of NYC’s Issue Project Room to the future-club environment of DOMMUNE in Tokyo. While thematically following Toxic City Music, it moves past that album’s emphasis on superfund sites and the proverbial rat race to turn an ear towards more rural environs.

With a focus on some of the sounds we stand to lose if we continue on our current trajectory of ecological destruction, birds, insects, and water are most often found amongst the glowing synthesizers and warped electric guitar that comprise the album’s melodic and rhythmic core. Connecting a thread between musique concrete and dub, these sounds are atomized and diffused before being woven together with a sense of urgency, a colorful and restless haze. Phasing percussion and blurred melodies are wrapped in a fog as they tumble and glitch, occupying a space where ominous rumblings and bucolic bliss blur together. An offering of cautious optimism in the age of anxiety. 

“Caminiti’s sounds are impossible to pick apart, but as his melted-together blend envelops the listener, inky patterns begin to appear. [He] has developed a labyrinthine sound, and navigating it makes Varispeed Hydra a mysterious and enticing listen.”
-Pitchfork

“Varispeed Hydra’s ten concise tracks seem to exert the physical force of gusts lifting leaves past your head. Its sounds, which include only a small leaven of recording of birds or water, have a faint aeolian quality, living slightly outside human design like the wind itself.”
-The Wire

“Caminiti's music subverts traditional dub techno structures in an even more challenging way, often distilling the form down to just a few simple chords expanding and contracting in a disorienting state of suspended animation…this album reveals itself to be a seething, sizzling, and multilayered production tour de force and quite an absorbing one at that.” -Brainwashed

“Over the past half decade Caminiti’s glacial metamorphosis from drone to dematerialised ambient dub has seen his work become as succinct as it is abstract. On ‘Varispeed’ he deftly uses a combination of tape and electro-acoustic process, coupled with “live electronics” by Lisa McGee to shape a series of organic-sounding ecologies where time moves to its own internal logic and no two seconds repeat themselves…Caminiti has made a virtue of evoking an underlying narrative between the parts that really comes into its own with sequestered, immersed listening of the sort we’re all practising right now.”
-Boomkat