IN YOUR EYES EZINE
https://www.iyezine.com/mark-solotroff-in-search-of-total-placelessness
July 8, 2025, by NoiseGang
Mark Solotroff, a key figure in the American noise-industrial and power electronics scene (founder of Intrinsic Action , Anatomy of Habit, BLOODYMINDED), returns this year with In Search of Total Placelessness, an album that reflects his longstanding interest in the dissolution of space-time coordinates. The title itself suggests a desire to transcend fixed places and geographical references, weaving soundscapes constructed with analog synthesizers and environmental recordings collected between Chicago, Milan, and Venice.
Solotroff's musical offering is allegorical and consistent with his aesthetic of organic noises and analog drones. The album comprises 16 tracks, an hour of minimalism that, for the most attentive and sensitive listeners, presents itself as a warm, meditative, and deeply emotional embrace.
Listening to In Search of Total Placelessness is a fragmented yet coherent journey through analog landscapes and urban abstractions. Sounds condense and transform: the soft hisses of synths and ambient noises collected in the field create a fluctuating sonic fabric, suspended between dystopian cities and natural landscapes. It's an "urban tundra" that transports us to an empty station, where we suddenly hear the distant passage of a train; then silence, then a hum that seems to come from within ourselves.
Each piece has a variable, often extended duration, built around a slow drone core interwoven with granular textures, always handled with delicacy and aesthetic sensibility. The definition of "placelessness" becomes tangible: this album invites you to abandon all reference points.
It's not about aggressive noise or rhythmic passages. So, if you're wearing a The Body t-shirt and listening to Terror Cell Unit's "Come and Test Christ" in the car on your way to work, it might not be the right album for you. Here, time is dilated, the atmosphere hypnotic, devoid of classical structures. The album harbors an absolute fascination with emptiness, where the processing of frequencies and sonic nuances dissolves into an analog continuum.
Solotroff leaves behind any defined territory: Milan, Venice, Chicago, and natural environments merge into a single, suspended dimension. The listener is invited to navigate fluidity and abstraction, finding in silence and minimalism a unique aptitude for deep and meditative listening.
In Search of Total Placelessness is a work dedicated to those who understand the industrial drone dimension and the impalpability of analog sound. It's not an album for casual listening: it requires concentration and a willingness to let the hum and sonic memories permeate you. It's perfect as a soundtrack for art installations, esoteric settings, and moments of technological meditation.
What to expect:
Long-endurance synthetic drones
Soft and sparse ambient recordings (urban and natural sounds)
Suspended pauses and meditative atmospheres
Liquid sound flows that transcend spatial coordinates
A smooth, hypnotic approach, ideal for immersive listening
Estimated rating:
For enthusiasts: 8.5/10 – A thoughtful, deep, and impressive album; refined ambient noise, auteur electronic minimalism, and all-around meditative sound art.
For more conventional listeners: 5-6/10 – if you’re looking for rhythm, recognizable melodies, or an immediate listen, this is definitely not an “entry level” album.
BRAINWASHED
Mark Solotroff, “In Search of Total Placelessness”
April 20, 2025, by Creaig Dunton
Expanding upon the themes of place and space that has shaped his recent solo works, Mark Solotroff's latest record unsurprisingly features heavy use of his trademark analog synths. What changes, however, is the actual inclusion of sonic spaces: environmental recordings captured from his current hometown of Chicago, as well as travels in Milan and Venice. The intersection of these spatial recordings and electronic instrumentation gives In Search of Total Placelessness a different feel than his other recent works but sits beautifully alongside them.
Rather than specifically focusing on a sense of space, In Search of… features a shift to emphasizing movement and transition, creating a sense of space but one that is short lived, transitioning to a new one rapidly. Balancing short segments (30 seconds to one minute) with longer pieces, with each fading in and out, Solotroff captures that sense of spatial and temporal transition perfectly, with some lingering longer than others, but theme of movement is overt, while still sounding like a coherent album.
"Immediately After Vanishing" is the first longer piece, pairing layers emphasizing high and low frequencies that are polarized without being overbearing. There is an almost digital brittleness to the sound that at times resembles an idling jet engine with the mid frequencies scraped out. Solotroff also maintains a sense of structure throughout the piece, which results in an almost looping sense to it without falling into repetition.
With "Adhesion to Shadows" he leads off with what sounds like sheets of rain and a deep rumble that again features a sense of musical structure lower in the mix. He shifts between dense, interconnected layers and spaciousness, again conjuring a sense of movement while letting hints of melody bleed through. Bits of pseudo-melody also appear on "Rational Devices Lost in a Void," where the higher pitched synth layers begin to sound like actual notes at times, and a combination of buzz and rumble is filtered to a point of becoming almost overwhelming.
Solotroff emphasizes both the location recordings and electronics on "Street Works Leading Nowhere" right from the onset, with some apparent echoing recordings of urban spaces blended with a rhythmic chug that brings to mind his more straight forward power electronics projects. He makes the synths crunch while the mix builds and collapses, and it is disorienting throughout, ending on a seemingly junk metal crash.
At over 11 minutes, closer "The Left Half of My Body Untethered" is a fitting conclusion, as he brings everything together in an immediately dense mix, redlining the volume and featuring significant panning layers. What sounds almost like incidental conversations captured by his recorder appear, though too far off to be identifiable, even as the mix slowly comes apart and floats off.
The shorter pieces work as stand-alone works as well: in half of a minute, "Protective Factors Slip Away" is a rush of noise that could be ocean waves, could be a passing subway, or could be a jet engine. The metallic resonance of "Floorbound Intersection" is a minute of wet sewer ambience, and "Time Overlaps Unresolved" is a short work of creaking, clattering noises and isolated parking garage vibes.
Even within the scope of his multitude of other projects, Mark Solotroff's solo excursions continue to be thematically unique compelling. The titles of albums and individual pieces may hint at what he strives to do on each one, but the sounds themselves perfectly align with his intent and focus. Like an expert sculptor who works with analog synthesizers and electronics rather than bronze or clay, Solotroff never fails to shape sound into carefully calculated constructs with perfection.
NEW NOISE MAGAZINE
Album Premiere: Mark Solotroff – ‘In Search Of Total Placelessness’
April 23, 2025, by Abir Mahmud
Electronic music veteran Mark Solotroff is sharing his new full-length In Search Of Total Placelessness, which is going to be released on April 25. The album was mastered by Collin Jordan at The Boiler Room in Chicago.
The new album is a journey through the ever-changing nature of our lives. Solotroff composed the record to blur the lines of space and time. The listeners will be drawn to a world where any definition is ever evolving, elusive, and fluid.
EVERYTHING IS NOISE
April 16, 2025, by Eeli Helin
A moment in time – bereft of warmth and familiar voices, swathed in yearning for outcomes that never came to pass, longing for people who aren’t there, asking for forgiveness on deeds that can not be forgiven. Somewhere in the startling and suffocating yet deeply moving static, a grain clings on to both things that never were and those that it hopes will one day be, while drifting further beyond the perimeters of consciousness, away from helping hands, out of rescue’s reach. Within the constantly growing embrace of nothingness and extreme isolation, it begins to recognise echoes of its past self, as if calling from behind a veil, reining it to float towards yet another unknown, only to be met by itself, existing simultaneously here and there, in before and after, in the once were and the will be.
I’ve written about Mark Solotroff a multitude of times, either by means of premieres or this feature, and I keep coming back for more whenever I see that name appear out of the blue. Today, I’m glad to provide the verbal vessel carrying the premiere for the song “Frozen Gestures Under the Milky Surface”, taken from his upcoming album In Search Of Total Placelessness, out on the 25th of this month. Take a moment to wind down from whatever it is that you’re doing, grab a pair of headphones or dial your speakers up to their limits while preparing to take a dive into the lap of noise, hit play from below, and close your eyes.
The opening metaphor, while potentially a bit out there, becomes more tangible when you apply the same sentiment to everyday life. After all, I’d argue most of us can relate to being out of place; to existing in a liminal space where we have abandoned our past selves yet can’t quite put into effect the self that we are going to be. Whether places, people, moments, commodities, or anything else for that matter, as beings, our primary experience is the constant struggle between losing and gaining while trying to discover our purpose, and sometimes being stuck in the middle to no avail.
All of the above being merely my own interpretation, Solotroff also explained the following on the song’s backgrounds;
‘“Frozen Gestures Under the Milky Surface” is rooted in a place that first etched itself into memory many years ago, shaped by a sound both unsettling and quotidian. Formed intersection of human presence and natural forces, it carries the weight of its origins—a persistent, undeniable pulse woven into the fabric of existence there. As the music unfolds, it transports the listener into a realm where sound becomes an immersive force, tethering past experience to the present.‘
The song itself feels like it’s recorded from beyond the abovementioned veil, washed in static while familiar sounds and echoes form a near-percussive, haunting element to provide movement to the entire six-minute track. The wavering and pulsating fuzz forms a tapestry that washes over you frantically, encasing all sorts of glimpses of things that you need to decipher for yourself to comprehend. There’s ultimately very few words to properly convey the state of emotion I am trying to piece together here, so it’d be wise for you to just listen to the song itself, on repeat, to discover what it is that you personally need to discover in this very moment.
In Search Of Total Placelessness can be pre-ordered on Bandcamp where you can also stream a previously released single off of it, and you can stay up to date on Solotroff and his doings on Instagram and Facebook. There’s still some time before the new one drops, so take your time to go over his previous albums in preparation for what’s to come.
EVERYTHING IS NOISE
Weekly Featured Artist: Mark Solotroff
March 25, 2024, by Eeli Helin
New interview now available
https://everythingisnoise.net/weekly-featured-artist/wfa-mark-solotroff/
BRAINWASHED
November 26, 2023, by Creaig Dunton
An artist who always has something in progress or forthcoming, Mark Solotroff's has been most prolific under his own name as of late. Different from the frenetic, yet organized chaos of BLOODYMINDED, the doomy bombast of Anatomy of Habit, or the murky improvisations of The Fortieth Day (and those are only a few examples), his solo material in recent years has been more introspective and meditative, at times drifting into almost ambient territories. Following 2020's You May Be Holding Back and 2021's Not Everybody Make It, Today the Infinite, Tomorrow Zero continues his focus on using analog synths alone with a four track, but creating a depth and variance of sound that belies its rather Spartan origins. Compared to these recent albums though (and the Return to Oneself compilation of digital singles), the depth is even greater and further realized, and the sound has expanded to one that is almost musical, without ignoring any of the intensity expected from Solotroff.
From a structural standpoint, Today the Infinite features shorter pieces than the previous two, with You May Be Holding being a pair of 30-minute pieces, and Not Everybody Makes It's six, ten-minute segments. He once again imposes that rigid hour-long duration on the album, but in smaller, six-minute increments this time. Because of this, the sound and style differ more notably from song to song than it did on those previous albums, emphasizing both noise and melody throughout.
Additionally, the fade in/fade out dynamic he utilizes on each piece gives a vignette like quality, a passing state or emotion that comes and goes, but fully realized and self-contained. Opener "The Weight of Your Own" is a perfect example of the balance on this album: fading in via gauzy layers of synth, underscored by an engine like hum, he balances the noise and the musicality, with carefully controlled feedback giving a bit of spikiness to an otherwise understated work. This combination is also a defining facet of "You May Slip Between," with a lush melody buried under fuzzy synths, occasionally rising up to take focus, to only retreat again into the fuzz.
Melody is something that is even more apparent on this album than his previous synth works, such as the delicate shimmer of "Almost All Promises" that overall makes for a surprisingly gentle, flowing piece. Solotroff retains the melody but generates a bit more overall force via more low-end elements on "Desire Without Wounds," with the full spectrum of sound well represented. There is also a prominent rumble throughout "Keeping Themselves to Themselves," which transitions to lighter frequencies towards its conclusion, but the heaviness remains.
Of course, it would not be a Solotroff work without some noise and abrasiveness, although even that is kept in check to make for an album with notable consistency. The cavernous rumble of "The Study of One" eventually shifts into a metallic, clanging echo chamber of scraping metal, and "Restoring Contact with Experience" stays distorted and noisy even with some almost psychedelia snuck in. Much like the opening piece, "The Hold on Life" brings both extremes together, with churning, mechanical pulsations paired with melodious drifts, making for an overall pleasant conclusion to the album, albeit with some distinct dark moments as well.
Ultimately, there is a bleak beauty to this album, a sonic pairing of the hopeful and the hopeless, a sense clearly conveyed from the album's title. This is a sensibility that has been imbued in his recent work, both solo and in group settings. For BLOODYMINDED and Anatomy of Habit, Solotroff clearly conveys this via his vocals and lyrics, but here, with only synths and magnetic tape, he manages to deliver a similarly wide array of experiences and emotions that perfectly encapsulates the complexities of life.
MUSIQUE MACHINE
Mark Solotroff - Today The Infinite, Tomorrow Zero [Self release - 2023]
November 11, 2023, by Colin Lang
For those of us less inclined to molly and the lure of the club floor, a useful if reductionist cut through the ever-proliferating genres of electronic music might look something like this: there are those who sequence and there are those who don’t. This could ease the usual consternation over the adequacy of terms that have as much similarity as difference. Is that EDM or IDM? The tempo is under 130 bpm, so what is it then? I miss the techno catchall, for it served as a kind of shibboleth among non-DM folks, who could only get into electronic synthesis once someone proved to them that you could make things that no person in their right mind would dance to, and that the specific history of the technology (the synthesizer) had more to do with conjuring the spirits of the nether reaches than any repeatable groove or pattern.
Enter synthesizer stalwart Mark Solotroff, who has made an album, Today the Infinite, Tomorrow Zero, that simultaneously looks backwards and forwards in its rootedness in the history of the technology he employs. Over 10 tracks, each of the exact same length (6:05), Solotroff takes us on a journey of pure sonic exploration whose continuity – this is the truly remarkable character of the album – refuses and bypasses the all-too-recent history of electronic music cum dance soundtrack. Each of the 10 compositions has its own textural character, but the overall feeling is one of sounds being suffocated, snuffed out before they turn into the stuff of producers and grooveheads. Throughout each of the tracks, the fluidity, the organic wholeness, of Solotroff’s work is on display, a feat of synthesis on par with the eponymous machines. Of course, one could easily put this in the drone drawer and be done with it, but the striking similarities between the sonic nature of alien transmissions and the rumbling acoustic territory beneath are feet, might be overshadowed in the process.
Today the Infinite, Tomorrow Zero will appeal to anyone with the temperament to appreciate it, which means that the genre police will be left scratching their heads (just as long as the heads don’t nod!). Think of outer space, the universe without light, or those magical moments between songs when the microphones managed to capture more than they should have. Very highly recommended!
Rating: 5/5
https://www.musiquemachine.com/reviews/reviews_template.php?id=10072
DECIBEL
Full Album Stream: Mark Solotroff – ‘Today The Infinite, Tomorrow Zero’
October 31, 2023, by Adam Tepedelem
We’re gonna go ahead and ease you into the Halloween insanity (fireworks are part of the celebrations up here in Canada) with some dark ambient noise courtesy of Bloodyminded/Anatomy Of Habit founder Mark Solotroff. Solotroff is also the founder/owner of the BloodLust! label, purveyors of industrial electronic noise since 1995, and today we’re offering a full premiere of his third solo release, Today The Infinite, Tomorrow Zero. The looping, static-y sounds will help get your head right for whatever All Hallows Eve celebrations you may have planned. And if you’re staying home to dole out candy to trick or treaters, Solotroff’s vaguely menacing, tense soundscapes offer the perfect soundtrack to set the mood for a night of fright.
Today The Infinite, Tomorrow Zero is set for release on November 3 on four-panel digipak CD and digitally on all major platforms. Place your preorders here.
Quote: “I’m excited to share my new album here, today of all days, in advance of its release on Friday. It may not be full-on Halloween spooky, but it’s definitely seasonally correct, as it’s filled with a strong autumnal sense of melancholy and nostalgia. We’re living in darker days, literally and figuratively, after all. Mood-wise, it’s probably easier to connect to Anatomy of Habit, even if the palate is different, but a lot of friends of Bloodyminded will already know the direction I’ve been headed with my solo releases. I invite the rest of you to sink into the unsettling ambience and see where the mood takes you.”
EVERYTHING IS NOISE
Hear Mark Solotroff Make “Almost All Promises” to You
October 18, 2023, by Eeli Helin
It’s autumn. Potentially that’s not a part of your reality as of now, but up here close to the Arctic Circle, it’s very much in effect. What that means, is first and foremost oddly beautiful sceneries made up of dying things, migrating birds, freezing sunlit mornings, and a very particular kind of mood that sets the mind in a somewhat sullen ease, before the seemingly endless darkness of winter sets in. During these times, I tend to gravitate towards equally melancholic music, often with the emphasis on ambiance and vivid tonalities that engage in a beckoning dance together with the rust hues of my surroundings.
Mark Solotroff is a multi-instrumentalist and a veteran electronic musician, whose new album Today The Infinite, Tomorrow Zero comes out on November 3. The Chicago based multidisciplinary artist has made a name for himself by working on the ever-exquisite fields of experimental, post-industrial, noise, and metal music, dating back to the mid-80s. While perhaps best known for his vocal work in Anatomy Of Habit and BLOODYMINDED, and having founded Intrinsic Action, Solotroff’s endeavours with analog synthesizers dates back to his earliest recordings and continues still today, and today we’re glad to bring you the latest showcase of just that by means of premiering the song “Almost All Promises” for you, taken from how upcoming album. Sit down with a pair of headphones or speakers, and take the track in in all of its harrowing lo-fi-esque glory.
Spectral by design and ethereal by nature, “Almost All Promises” exemplifies the remainder of the album in essence. The whole album was recorded directly to a four-track tape recorder as layered synths, then looped to achieve various outcomes that each stand on their own, whether in a more melodic and lush or more grating and haunting manner. While “Almost All Promises” relies more heavily on the beautiful end of the scope, it isn’t bereft of that inexplicable feeling of yearning and emotive dearth one can experience from time to time, and not in the least during the autumns, as I explained in the first paragraph. Solotroff himself explained the following about the song:
‘“Almost All Promises” might be the calmest and prettiest song that I’ve ever created, particularly due to the complex melody that loops in and out. I’m slowly getting used to these types of compositions emanating from my head. Don’t let this wolf in sheep’s clothing fool you, though. What’s the easiest way to ‘fill in the blank’ with this title? I know that for me, it would read ‘Almost All Promises Are BROKEN’. Therein lies the very essence of this album and its title, in its most reductive form. Today you are promised something, and tomorrow that promise is broken, leaving you with ZERO.‘
So are these promises actual ones made by fellow humans, or the world surrounding us, or something else entirely? Not to sound like a broken clock with my analogies, but again I’d say that the notion of autumn fits to Solotroff’s description. After all, what is autumn if not a promise of beauty and vibrancy only to be broken by what awaits lurking in the horizon in mere weeks or even days?
A case could be made about the fact that Today The Infinite, Tomorrow Zero is a contemporary album tied – but not limited – to a moment in time, existing both sonically and creatively in a liminal space, entering the post-pandemic world by means of sounds that could just as easily be decades old at this point, to produce invigorating and strong, albeit eerie, sensations that further underline how some things should be experienced separated from everything else, to be fully understood for what it is. To some, the lo-fi washes and near-indecipherable tonalities of something like “Almost All Promises” can be daunting, but to others such as myself, it’s simply everything.
Mark Solotroff‘s Today The Infinite, Tomorrow Zero is out on November 3, and you can pre-order the record from here as well as follow the artist on Facebook over here. Meanwhile, you have a few weeks to prepare to get your heart put through a woodchipper.
https://everythingisnoise.net/premieres/hear-mark-solotroff-make-almost-all-promises-to-you/
New interview now available
https://www.bridge-chicago.org/bridge-audio/solotroff
LAGNIAPPE EXPOSURE
Mark Solotroff "Not Everybody Makes It"
August 6, 2021
An elegy for loved ones lost, Mark Solotroff encapsulates this despair within six ten-minute drones that enclose the listener with the buried ghosts of melodies, appearing to only be dragged back under, prolonging that ache for an unbroken hour. Best for fans of experimental/drone.
https://lagniappeexposure.com/2021/08/06/the-roux-august-week-i/
THE VIKING IN THE WILDERNESS
Mark Solotroff, "Not Everybody Makes It"
August 1, 2021
US artist Mark Solotroff is out with the album "Not Everybody Makes It", and ambient music is what we are treated to here. This isn't your typical new age variety of the form however, but a dark, dystopian and minimalist take on the style. Machine-like drones dominate the sparse landscapes here, with subtle fluctuating lighter toned sounds and drones adding a careful and often alien sounding contrast. Soundscapes that would have been fitting as the musical backdrop for someone traveling through a post-nuclear wasteland. Those who like their ambient music to be dark, dystopian and minimalist in nature should have a very good chance of finding this album to be quite the rewarding experience.
https://www.facebook.com/wildernessviking/posts/4135679196530415
DISTORTED SOUND
Mark Solotroff, "Not Everybody Makes It"
July 31, 2021, by Rowan Howard
(Excerpt)
But what can be said is that Solotroff’s ear for sound is more unique than most. A listen to this record may inspire a new way of thinking and appreciating noise; a ponder into the authenticity of sound regarding what we consider to be music. Or, it may have no affect on you whatsoever. That’s the beauty of artistry and its audience, and we’re sure Solotroff would agree.
https://distortedsoundmag.com/album-review-not-everybody-makes-it-mark-solotroff/
THE SLEEPING SHAMAN
Mark Solotroff, "Not Everybody Makes It"
July 29, 2021, by George Green
How important is it to be acquainted with the oeuvre of an artist before embarking on the listening required to review their work? Should the reviewer be au fait with the back catalogue of the creator, their side projects, solo work, former bands before committing an opinion, or even a guided tour of the new dispatch to words? Do I need to have at least an overview of a musician’s previous output in order to contextualise their new creation? Or does having their artistic back catalogue as a point of reference colour the way that any and all listeners hear, experience and formulate views on everything the artist does ad infinitum?
In short, is it better to dive in cold or to gradually immerse oneself in the heated pool of historical creation?
No idea. But it is a question with some relevance when one comes to the work of Mark Solotroff, who, for those who are unaware, is a veteran of the doom band Anatomy Of Habit as well as the electronic band Bloodyminded. He founded the early post-industrial band Intrinsic Action and has played a part in, or otherwise collaborated with, a list of acts as long as your arm, including The Atlas Moth, Brutal Truth, Consumer Electronics, Indian, Locrian, Plague Bringer, Sigillum S, and The Sodality. There are as many polarities as there are points of useful comparison in this list but there is a vein coursing with a consistent lifeblood that underlies Solotroff’s work, and that sanguinatory fluid is a love for the analogue synth.
I’m no synth expert – analogue or otherwise – but this album is awash with swathes of synth drones, tones, and noise, huge washes of brittle texture bordering on crisp, stretched percussion in their timbre and pitch. Against this sonic setting the melodies, such as they are, comprise simple, short softer phrases that contrast with the thin, continuous drone that form the backbone of each piece.
The drone shimmers throughout this collection sounding for all the world like a glass armonica, swelling and rising, swirling around the head of the listener, giving the feeling of being lost in the baleful fog of a nineteen seventies children’s television programme in which psychedelic horror, far too adult for its audience, threatens the protagonist (and vicariously the viewer) at every twist. This music is metallic enough to leave a coppery taste in the listener’s mouth but it certainly ain’t metal. This is a pure, fragile, crystalline drone, one that conjures images of its creation on Tibetan singing bowls and the aforementioned glass armonica, though one assumes that these sounds were teased by Solotoff out of his beloved analogue synths.
Re-listening to Not Everybody Makes It I keep coming back to the idea that there’s an all encompassing stillness in this music, and yet at its heart is an inexorable motion, a movement that is perpetual but keeps us trapped within a Escher-like circuit, ever gliding on, never to reach the end, yet always at the end. The accompanying promotional material describes this work as unexpectedly tranquil and that maybe true if the listener is expecting something akin to Solotroff’s previous work. I can’t help feeling that within the brittle drone is a dark ambivalence bordering on menace – one could, with little difficulty, imagine certain scenes from a Ben Wheatly or an Ari Aster film being played out to any of the pieces herein.
There is a device within this album, in that each piece is exactly ten minutes long. There are two views one could take of this: Firstly, that shorter pieces have been pointlessly stretched and longer pieces cruelly curtailed in order to satisfy the conceit. Secondly, that the artist has disciplined his ambition to provide himself with a constrictive frame within which he must work. I like the latter way of looking at it, by placing limits on his work Solotroff has stretched himself, rather than the ideas, has forced himself to answer a self-imposed question. This, I would imagine, requires some rigour from a creative, a willingness to corral and cull any organic growth that wants to spread beyond the prescribed space.
This collection was in part Solotroff’s response to the emergence of the pandemic last year, a set of circumstances that intensified the significance of the themes with which his work is usually concerned – how people navigate and interact with each other, particularly in an age of alienation caused by severe digital fragmentation, how cities develop and how the human body navigates urban environments. Taking this into account the layers of stillness, movement, fragility, ambivalence, menace, and unease wrapped in the strata of glassy, metallic drone make sense. This is a very beautiful yet disquieting collection that Solotroff has created, perfect for our times.
https://www.thesleepingshaman.com/reviews/mark-solotroff-not-everybody-makes-it/
BRAINWASHED
Mark Solotroff, "Not Everybody Makes It"
July 25, 2021, by Creaig Dunton
Mark Solotroff could never be accused of taking it easy when it comes to music, both in terms of style and productivity. Since the beginning of 2020 he has been responsible for three side project releases (Nightmares, The Fortieth Day, and Ensemble Sacrés Garçons), two archival releases from his early Intrinsic Action band, and just a matter of weeks ago a BLOODYMINDED live compilation. Add that to three volumes of compiled solo material and an album last year, and there’s a massive stack of material that Not Everybody Makes It now sits atop. Even with all of that material, this new album stands out as distinct, and somewhat of an unexpected turn for Solotroff's work, but is still clearly his.
What makes this disc stand out is the more significant restraint and lighter touch he employs on all six of these (exactly) ten minute pieces. I would be significantly concerned if he released anything that is not constructed around lo-fi analog synth noises, and that is certainly the foundation of everything here, but the mixes are less dense and the volumes are lower, giving everything a bleaker, more isolated sensibility.
Themes of isolation have been prevalent in Solotroff's recent work, with a series of eight tapes in the past few years (compiled earlier this year onto three 2CD volumes as the Strategic Planning series), but while those captured a sense of urban loneliness and anomie, Not Everybody Makes It is more personal and introspective. Besides the intentional imagery conveyed by the title, the hushed volumes and pseudo-melodies (not something often associated with his work) lock on to this sense of loneliness and despair.
Even with this more ambient (or isolationist, to borrow the fitting term for the 1990s ambient offshoot genre that never was) turn, certain staples from Solotroff's repertoire could never be abandoned: his love of heavy sub bass frequencies appears throughout, especially on "Charged Matter (The Problem from the Inside)" and "Suffering Sun (Barren Winter)." For both of these that low end is still prominent, but on the former it is an undulating passage beneath lightly drifting electronics and synths like bowed strings mixing with amplified hums. On the latter, it gives a slow, trudging propulsion beneath melodic sweeps and subtle white noise sheets.
The rumble also underscores most of "The Chaos of Objects (Tell Her to Follow Me)," paired with hissy metallic static. Here, even though the instrumentation never really deviates from those basic elements, Solotroff still effortlessly blends the basic parts into a piece with distinct movement and flow. This contrasts with the idling engine ambience of "Spatial Unrest (Irresistible Belief)," which is perfectly still and frozen. He saves the most peaceful piece for the end: "Return to Pleasure (Body Into Voice)" is a suite of droning tones that slowly drift away, making for the most peaceful work I have ever heard him have a hand in.
The shift of studying isolation from the spatial to the personal is pretty clear from this series of vignettes that complement Solotroff’s Strategic Planning works. Emphasizing the incidental melodies and sounds that are usually obscured by distortion and noise in his discography, there is thematic linkage, but the end products are distinct. For that reason there is a sense of vulnerability to Not Everybody Makes It that is rarely so obvious in his many projects. When placed alongside his other recent releases, it shows just how, in the hands of an expert, decades old electronic equipment can conjure such varying experiences and emotions. It may be a slight deviation from his normal approach, but the results are just as captivating.
CHICAGO READER
Mark Solotroff, Not Everybody Makes It
July 22, 2021, by Monica Kendrick
Chicago sound wizard Mark Solotroff has been wielding his powerful electronic grimoire since the mid-80s as the leader of Intrinsic Action, Bloodyminded, and Anatomy of Habit. He’s also collaborated with a who’s who of industrial and metal artists, including the Atlas Moth, Indian, Locrian, Plague Bringer, Wrekmeister Harmonies, Brutal Truth, and the Body. Then there are his side projects: in the past couple years, he’s remastered the extensive body of lo-fi synth music he released under the name Super Eight Loop, put out an album with dark-synth trio Nightmares, and revived his Milan-Chicago post-industrial collective Ensemble Sacrés Garçons, who put out their first album in 25 years. Solotroff brings the sum of his experience to bear on the albums he puts out under his own name, which reflect an artistic discipline that makes each record a distinct work with its own specific intentions. His new release, Not Everybody Makes It, is somber and deliberately restrained, meant to be played at a volume that allows the ambient sounds of the listener’s home to slip through (unlike some of his other work, which is definitely meant to be heard overwhelmingly loud). With its six songs, which run about ten minutes each, Solotroff shapes sound into bite-size meditations that thread the needle between representing anxiety and soothing it. Much of his work is confrontational and violent, but he’s also a master of the elegiac (such as in Anatomy of Habit), and that’s on full display throughout Not Everybody Makes It. Like much of the music I’ve heard from the past year and a half, its emotional perimeter has been shaped in part by solitude, grief, and worry. The opening track, “Charged Matter (The Problem From the Inside),” lays down the thesis and the challenge: to ground oneself and accept a new reality, to sit with the present moment and feel the sorrow for what has been lost. Solotroff often focuses on the relationship between the body and consciousness, and the windlike sweep and nagging drone of “Attention to Flesh (Compel Yourself)” make it sound like music for a spiritual workout with a ghostly personal trainer who isn’t going to cut you any slack. Solotroff recorded and mixed the album himself in April and May 2021, and Collin Jordan mastered it at the Boiler Room in May, as vaccines were being distributed en masse and Chicago began to slowly open up. A sense of hope permeates some of the tracks, such as “Return to Pleasure (Body Into Voice),” which invokes a cautious sense of relief that can only come after a difficult ordeal. Not Everybody Makes It is a beautiful, subtle record that will reward repeated listenings.
CAPTURED HOWLS
Mark Solotroff “Charged Matter (The Problem From The Inside)” (video)
July 20, 2021, by Caleb R. Newton
The song feels like a meditation on solitude amid noise — or at least the sense of such a thing, since dissociative unease proves readily apparent in the sound. The ominous track comes with a video that Solotroff put together, and the imagery that he’s provided supports this idea. The video, in which images have been altered and presented in a grayscale color palette but remain recognizable, follows a journey through city streets, and there’s an impression of feeling alone, or perhaps weighed down, even as signs of activity continue on largely unabated — and largely uncaring for the people living within their wakes. A cityscape stands as a monument to something — but that “something” is not always the people who move within it. Suddenly confronting an expanse of bustling inhumanity can prove jarring. Teeming, subtly piercing tones extend across this track’s runtime, and the sonic whir ends up sporting a somewhat metallic edge. This trek proceeds under the inward weight of the dynamically shimmering tones, which suggest unrest. The fog is never quite overpowering — instead, Solotroff focuses upon emotional states, as through chronicling a mix of anxiety and mourning. There’s space to immerse within the morose sounds that Solotroff presents. The track gets cinematic via its drawn out tones, and it moves forward, but this movement proceeds slowly and contemplatively — it’s quietly surreal.
NIGHT SCIENCE
Mark Solotroff "You May Be Holding Back"
March 22, 2020, by Chris Groves:
(Excerpt)
Mark Solotroff’s work is redolent of isolation. ‘You May Be Holding Me Back’ treats field recordings with careful synthesizer infiltration, the sounds of the city kept at bay through “A Literal Territory Occupied Literally” by a thick treatment of billowing synth fog, an insistent dying wind chime, and a slow delay which accents moments of occasional field recording clarity. The claustrophobia is gradual in onset but intense: slivers of Mark’s field recordings emerge as increasingly worrisome moments while the bilious synth coagulates unperturbed, smothering the broader city’s interactions in its cloud.
The isolating effect in “All In The Straw Together” is even more intense, the walls having closed in and starting to crawl with visual infestation. The field recordings are barely discernible and the thrum of the city has disappeared, replaced with a multi-layered haze of vibrating high end hallucinating and cyclic mid-toned insomnia. “All In The Straw Together” doesn’t pretend isolation is loneliness; rather, isolation manifests as apparitional disturbance wrapped around a depressed core, flickering in and out of reality as images of the chaos outside manifest as self-isolated mania.
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