Taken from the album “The Nearest Exit” due on Zozaya/Signal September 22nd 2017.
“The Nearest Exit” is the third album from Anglo/American collective Memory Drawings. Led by the hammered dulcimer of Minneapolis-raised, Casablanca-based Joel Hanson, the band also features Richard Adams (Hood/The Declining Winter), Sarah Kemp (Brave Timbers), Chris Cole (Movietone/Manyfingers) and Gareth S Brown (Hood). During the nearly three-year germination of the album’s eleven songs, the notion of an “exit” became an increasingly apt metaphor for a number of endings in the band’s own existence: the ending of relationships, of ways of thinking—even the end of life itself. “The Nearest Exit” is music to accompany those endings as well as a balm for the tumultuous emotional transformations that inevitably follow them.
For this third effort, the band consciously set out to make a sprawling record in the spirit of Bark Psychosis’ “Hex” or Slowdive’s “Pygmalion”, abandoning verse-chorus structures in favor of a music that turns slowly and subtly like the darkening of one’s mood on a rainy afternoon—before bringing the listener to more hopeful, redemptive places. The result is a varied template of sound ranging from two lonely Basinski-esque piano pieces by Gareth S Brown to chiming instrumental post-rock (“The Nearest Exit”) and several iconic examples of the gorgeous neo-classical pieces
that characterized Memory Drawings’ first two records: “Music For Another Loss” (Second Language, 2012 / Public House, 2017) and “There Is No Perfect Place” (Hibernate, 2014).
