Retro Music Exclusive: Hounds, Transpecific (LP)
Transpecific is an electronic music album available only at Retro. It features Incredibox beats and mods, Substack embeds, and mixes and curations by Seth Abramson. It is the first album from Hounds.
Transpecific Liner Notes
I promised when I launched Retro in October 2021 that I would from time to time use it to share my own creative work with readers. I fear I have done too little of that over the last twenty months. Hopefully I can begin to remedy this oversight now.
Transpecific is a 30-minute electronica LP that’s the first musical production I’ve ever been involved with. I say “involved with” because while I did do all the mixing and curation here, I didn’t create the samples myself; the samples are from Incredibox.
I called the album Transpecific because over the years I’ve been a professional music critic I’ve always wanted to create a soundscape-oriented experimental LP that lets listeners discover for themselves the storylines in the music. So in several senses at least this album is intended to transcend the specific by painting a backdrop against which your own imagination can play.
While I’ve done a little bit of traveling in my life—including crossing most of Canada, going down to Puerto Rico, seeing every country in Scandinavia, visiting three cities in China, and spending a week in all of Paris, London, Edinburgh, and Amsterdam—I haven’t done nearly as much exploring of this giant marble we’re on as I would like. So my other reason for naming this LP Transpecific is the pun of the title; the several backdrops this music aims to create are cities around the world one would have to cross the Pacific Ocean (thus going trans-Pacific) to have an adventure in. Some of these cities are ones I’ve been to, like London, Amsterdam, and Memphis; most of them I haven’t. So producing this album was as much about being exploring my own ideations as hoping to provoke new ones in others. For what it’s worth, the four tracks that reside closest to my heart are “Rio”, “Memphis”, “Warsaw” and the album closer, “Berlin.”
My expectation—as I continue working on this Hounds project—is that the “band’s” songs will get more and more sophisticated. This is my first foray into mixing (I was a DJ for some time, but on the radio, not on the tables!) so I do hope you’ll bear that in mind as you listen to the ten tracks below.
Because this album was created using Incredibox, we get an additional great benefit, too: being able to see extraordinarily colorful, well-drawn visualizations of these songs being “performed” by the “band” (Hounds). I think you will really enjoy these; all of them are so different! So definitely do click on the word “visualization” beneath each track to go right to the Incredibox site and see and hear these tracks in their native environment(s). Just press play when you get to Incredibox to start the performance.
I hope you will enjoy the music, and do let me know in the comments if a particular track here speaks to you and sparks your imagination!
{Note: For those wondering, Incredibox songs don’t appear to be uploadable to YouTube. It’s for this reason that I’ve used Substack’s wonderful audio-embedding protocol here, instead.}
Transpecific Track Listing
Sounds good! I like Warsaw & Berlin 👍🏻
Good try Seth, but don't quit your day job!