Songs We No Longer Sing [LP]

Phipps Pt. Is the duo of Lovage Sharrock and Jon Leidecker (Wobbly, Negativland, Thurston Moore Group). Falling somewhere between precise songcraft and free improvisation, acid folk and ambient electronics, the music Sharrock and Leidecker create is an ongoing conversation between two singular artists and longtime friends listening and responding to one another with care and curiosity. Songs We No Longer Sing-the duo's second studio album-is a song cycle which moves across vignettes of consumption, lust, grief, and what it takes to push through life at a moment when so many forces are marshalled against living.Sharrock's gossamer vocals and delicately finger-picked guitar find their complement in Leidecker's careful approach to processing both, so that input frequently becomes indistinguishable from output. The album's electronic glitches, buzzes, whirrs, and drones burnish rather than obscure Sharrock's plaintive melodies and imagistic lyrics. Phipps Pt. #work their sonic material into a final composition whose design, no matter how abstract, never erases the traces of the human hands behind it.Sharrock often says at the start of a performance that Phipps Pt. Is "an idea and a place that we are going to together." Full of strange beauty and unexpected emotional candor, Songs We No Longer Sing issues a similarly generous invitation to the listener to partake in many return visits.