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Love Is Yes

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Love Is Yes is the first album by Sander van der Toorn and Dax Niesten, an audio-visual duo de force of the same name.

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This heady debut is rooted equally in the worlds of fine art and experimental music. Sound and image meld wonderfully across 10 tracks, with shifting movements of music accompanied by a wealth of paintings and animations.

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Niesten's work summons the likes of Philip Guston and Maurice Sendak - with its crestfallen, cartoonish voids and cockle-warming grotesquery. Serenely contorted creatures are rendered on large canvases, and brought to fuzzy, maudlin life through a full-length animation that can be viewed alongside the record.

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Musically, the pair cite influences ranging from Vashti Bunyan to Morton Feldman. There is an ornate fragility, smeared by zero gravity focus shifts. Some glimpses suggest a corroded grail of Boards of Canada samples; motorik guitar, whispered messages, euphoric vistas and tangled memories all bathing in atomic glow.

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Records come complete with 16-page zine of bonus artwork by Dax.

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