Nearest Neighbour is a comic book and audio cassette/digital album that may or may not be heard and viewed simultaneously. The sounds might be a key to decoding the wordless world propagating through the pages of the book, but this is only a theory. A peculiar logic is at work but is this a mystic journey or a catalogue of fabric designs and carpets?

Download includes high res pdf graphic novel

Released August 11, 2018

Music by Dan Hayhurst
Artwork by Reuben Sutherland
++Sonics on Flat Battery by Arran Bolders
Mastered by Joe Caithness

“The album begins with “Deprogramming” – and that’s actually the effect it begins to have. There’s a hypnotic loop, a kind of synthesised jingle that encourages the ear to search for deviations from the phrasing, but this never comes. Instead, what follows sounds like the computer melting, physically deprogramming itself for several minutes before a different loop emerges to dance the ear in fresh directions. Again, like Tundra’s 2008 album, the listener is simultaneously left searching for an edge to cling to, but is also constantly stimulated by shifting pieces of the sonic picture. It’s puzzling and highly enjoyable. Nothing quite sits in time with anything else and the result is a glorious, hyper-unreal disorientation. “The Department Episode 31″ is the best demonstration of this. Sampled conversations jump around beneath blobs of bubbling electronics and it could almost be a sonic representation of the condition of aphasia. Sutherland’s accompanying graphic novel concentrates this sense of the hyperunreal – like Hayhurst’s 23 tracks, where gravity and grammar seem to have been replaced with an unfathomable internal logic, the novel’s comic strip features repeated scenes and motifs that are difficult to fully comprehend in terms of a narrative, but even more difficult to stop examining.”

Spenser Tomson, The Wire