HOLLAND ANDREWS WORDLESS / FORGETTINGS Frequently highlighting themes surrounding vulnerability and healing, American composer and performer Holland Andrews arranges music for voice, clarinet, and electronics. As a vocalist, their influences stem from a dynamic range including contemporary opera, theater, and jazz, while cultivating their own unique vocal style, integrating these influences with language disintegration and vocal distortion. Andrews’ ‘Wordless’ EP was first released in February 2021, then remastered and reissued by LEITER later that year. The four-track EP offers deeply-layered catharsis through an array of arpeggiated and glitched-out electronics, vocal and clarinet-driven compositions. ‘Forgettings’ is the second in a series of four digital EPs commissioned by LEITER. It is an instinctive follow-up to ‘Wordless’ which shares many of its predecessor’s characteristics while remaining admirably difficult to define. As likely to draw upon electronic as organic sources – like Andrew’s remarkably adaptable voice and their training as a clarinettist – it opens with the blissful, ecstatic ‘Transform Forever’, wreathing layers of harmonies around crystalline synth patterns, while the title track scavenges one of ‘Transform Forever’’s vocal refrains upon which it patiently builds a celestial, ultimately cathartic soundscape. ‘Green’’s profoundly meditative use of field recordings, sublime drones, muffled voices and soothing synths is meanwhile almost spiritual, and the quasi-ambient ‘Far Place’, on which Andrews worked with Son Lux’s Ryan Lott, leaves piano notes orbiting space. In addition to the digital release of Holland Andrews’ ‘Forgettings’ EP, LEITER offers a special vinyl edition containing all tracks from ‘Forgettings’ and the previously released ‘Wordless’ EP.
