ambient artist LFZ preps new LP for Castle Face (stream a track)

Los Angeles musician Sean Smith makes ambient music under the name LFZ, using primarily guitar but he feeds it through a plethora of analog and digital effects. The result: gorgeous, otherworldly soundscapes not unlike Brian Eno or Wendy Carlos. This is not the the kind of music you might associate with Castle Face, the label run by Oh Sees head John Dwyer, but they’re putting out LFZ’s new album, Name Plus Focus, on July 20. In lieu of a normal press release (not that Castle Face does anything in a normal way), John Dwyer offered up a poem. Here’s part of it:

Sean Smith soundtracks all these thoughts in my mind’s eye
His synth and guitar layered music is the signal
It is the force field, refracting light
It is the chemtrail drifting down like slow motion party glitter
From the heavens settling like moon flakes on the roofs of the cars
On the debris
On the upturned faces of the rabble

It is beautiful imagination at its best

We’ve got the premiere of the LP’s “Name Plus Focus Equals Purpose” and you can stream that, and check out album art, tracklist and all of Dwyer’s poem below.

“A glistening field of sport
Mylar turf sucking up to the feet of the future athlete
No noise from the crowd
Hypo-extinct brain waves peak at nominal levels
Mouths hang as they watch the rehearsed games unfold

Across megalopolis
Handshakes between men and machine
Ply for future rations
Every man for himself that isn’t under the spell of the government’s mind whip
Signals wash out over haphazardly stacked neighborhoods as they sleep
Investing, convincing, planting memories
Fabrication of emotion

And even farther still
Past the snicker-snack of the city’s air intake fans
A humming drone passes over the green grey canopy of the last forest
The no man’s land
Scanning for heat traces and human sound
Looking for the resistance with its red pin-prick eye

In the moments between search and seizure
the rebels eat from the forest floor
They climb trees, they commune with the animals
They live life, they stare out to the ocean, past the shanty skyscrapers
The last frontier

Sean Smith soundtracks all these thoughts in my mind’s eye
His synth and guitar layered music is the signal
It is the force field, refracting light
It is the chemtrail drifting down like slow motion party glitter
From the heavens settling like moon flakes on the roofs of the cards
On the debris
On the upturned faces of the rabble

It is beautiful imagination at its best” – John Dwyer

Tracklist:
#1 Start Forever
#2 Cryptomnesia
#3 These Crimes Occurred At Night
#4 Naturalistic
#5 Silence
#6 Name Plus Focus Equals Purpose
#7 An Ambiguous Utopia