Unease looms over Purple Clown Music. Composer, visual artist and raconteur Nathan Hartley Maas unravels a collection of instrumentals that fracture in disquieting spells, giving way to eerie harmonies and haunting melodies. Echoing like a rouge parade abandoned by its grand marshal, Maas's compositions are enveloped in soundscapes laced with his trademark caustic wit, as we hear the frenzy of toy robots imploding, circuits frying, and the internal mechanisms of an imaginary town sabotaging themselves in protest.
To borrow a phrase from author Larry L. King's 1968 review of Kurt Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House for The New York Times, [Nathan Hartley Maas] “...is a laughing prophet of doom.” Like Vonnegut, Maas is a weary observer of troubled times who uses language as a means to reconcile or accuse, whichever comes first. One gets the feeling listening to Purple Clown Music that Maas already knows something that we don't—perhaps a punchline to a cruel joke. There is a sense of encroaching darkness on this record, but each of its songs are like the album cover's bulbous clown heads that float above the purple smog, sentries who don't fear what's coming.
Purple Clown Music is vibrant and defiant with Maas's endlessly surprising song-craft. “Milxor E.” throbs with the stadium-sized intensity of a sporting event, while “Dutgoff Sqonnot” ripples with undulating square synthesizers reminiscent of soundtracks to early-90s CD-ROM point-and-click adventures. “Animotem Eyelif” chirps in patterns similar to electronic artists Richard D. James and Luke Vibert, resembling the warble of a warning siren you might hear in the hours just before a hurricane.
Underneath oppressive sheets of purple fog, a gravel-voiced narrator leads the listener through derelict dreams with a smile, mocking the impermanence of life. Nathan Hartley Maas has provided the indelible musical landscape for this journey—one well worth taking, if you don't mind laughing at the gathering storm.
Purple Clown Music is available to stream on nearly all digital music platforms and available for purchase through Apple Music. *Album artwork by Nathan Hartley Maas.