Loss is the long-awaited and anticipated follow-up to Marcus Fischer’s acclaimed Monocoastal (12k1063, 2010). Fischer created Loss over several years, finding inspiration to complete it during his time at the Robert Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, Florida, in early 2017. The album is a particularly emotional work as Fischer explored what loss means to him and how to cope with the permanence of absence. The result is decisively somber and perhaps one of the darkest, most emotional albums in the 12k catalog.
Fischer manifested the concepts of loss in his compositions through the use of generation loss from reel-to-reel tape, rerecording sounds through various speakers in physical spaces, layering, and the use of sounds that have been physically displaced from their source. Conceptually, he listened inside the degradation of sound, pulling out chance moments of beauty and hope amid the rubble.
While Loss has a bleak and lonely tone, the music is characteristic of Marcus Fischer with fragile tape loops on the edge of falling apart, distant haunting melodies and a physicality that grounds the album’s human spirit.
Fischer has utilised instruments like a piano found in a salvage warehouse or a xylophone made of metal wrenches. Through the use of these found instruments and the resulting manipulation that he actions, Fischer creates a record that is purposefully fragmented and worn down. As with the effect of stripping floor boards or exposing brick work in a building to enhance character. Just as one can listen to a seashell to create a sense of the coast, Monocoastal provides a likeness to this; bringing the sea and its surrounding beauty to life through a collection of instruments and their resulting sounds.
Fischer cites his movements up and down the West coast of America during the last two decades as a major influence on his sound, infusing frayed, fractured and quietly restrained compositions with field recordings and allowing lo-fi noise textures to creep and grow around both the artificial and natural sounds like tiny little organisms which slowly catalyse the whole thing into life.
