Advanced Myth is the lucid debut album from
Dialect, the long standing project of British
composer, multi-instrumentalist, and field
recordist Andrew PM Hunt. An enchanted
exploration of unusual source synthesis, electroacoustic arrangements, and sound found in
foreign environments, Advanced Myth is its own
cosmos expanding and contracting in real time.
Advanced Myth coincided with the creation of
the Liverpool-based musician’s Dialect moniker,
marking a more permanent uncoupling from the
“frontman” dynamic Hunt wrestled with as part
of Sophisti-pop band, Outfit. Happily unmoored
ever since, Hunt has built a broad oeuvre
with a quiet confidence across several album,
including Gowanus Drifts (2015), Loose Blooms
(2017), and Under ~ Between (2021), his debut
for RVNG Intl., and its companion piece, Keep
Going…Under.
“Doing something as abstract as Advanced
Myth was a real change for me at the time and
turned out to be something of a new start,”
Hunt explains. “The band had a studio set up
in a disused block of flats just across from the
big, shared house we all lived in, and I started
to record there by myself a lot. At some point in
2013, I realized I’d amassed a huge collection
of miniatures and a few larger pieces which had
nothing to do with what the band was doing.
Dialect became a way to gather these ideas
together and find my own voice.”
Steering towards lesser-explored musical
terrains wasn’t new to Hunt even then; he’d
toured the UK and Europe underground in
various projects since his teenage days, and
contributed to large ensemble performances of
work by the likes of Terry Riley and John Cage.
However, Advanced Myth was made amidst
a correlation of events that set him on a fresh
trajectory, including a new relationship (with his
now-wife), the winding down of Outfit, and time
spent living in New York City.
Hunt says that he hears “a lot of beauty and
excitement, but also the sadness and struggle”
of NYC in Advanced Myth. Having left Liverpool
to rent an apartment there in the fall of 2014,
he immersed himself in the library of critical
theory and art history books that its owners
had amassed, alongside reading materials like
the diary of Hercule Barbin and satirical short
stories like The Nose by Nikolai Gogol. This
almost academic absorption of ideas contrasted
with the time Hunt spent volunteering at a
homeless shelter, where hardship was on full
display and privilege checked at the door.
It’s perhaps no surprise then, that although
a largely meditative listen, Advanced Myth
oscillates between moments of shimmering
lucidity and corrosive washes of noise. Take
the improvisational zither session he recorded
one morning, sections of which appear on the
almost folk-like “Hung Rose” and “Unanswered
Prayers.” On the former, this chiming instrument
twists unbridled until submerged by a
discordant hiss, the sound of traffic, and the
elevated ambience of a sporting event. On the
latter, though, its delicacy and poise is bolstered
further with the addition of strings and clarinet.
Advanced Myth is a coil of both reflective and
reactive composition.
In the absence of conventional structure,
it’s these shifts in spirit that provide Advanced
Myth’s emotive signposting, inspired in part by
the likes of Laurie Spiegel’s The Expanding
Universe and Mother Mallard’s Portable
Masterpiece Company, European kosmische,
but also purely textural sonic ideas from ‘70s
and ‘80s GRM through to contemporary ASMR.
In truth, though, Advanced Myth is to be
received as its own, and as a whole. Tracks, as
they are, don’t start or stop, instead bleeding
into each other, in support or rebuttal, gently
persuading the mood into the shadows. It’s a
record from which you can sonically draw lines
to everything Dialect has gone on to, yet it
also stands alone as a document that’s relative
tranquility doesn’t mask the sense of excitement
from an artist standing at the precipice of new
creative boundaries.
Originally released digitally by tasty morsels
in 2015, Advanced Myth has been newly
mastered by Stephan Mathieu from definitive
mixes, and is available for the first time on
vinyl and cassette from RVNG Intl. and Warm
Winters, Ltd. on September 30, 2022. On behalf
of Dialect, RVNG, and Warm Winters, a portion
of the proceeds from this release will benefit
The Whitechapel Centre, an independent local
charity working to see an end to homelessness,
social exclusion and housing poverty in
Liverpool’s communities.