The follow-up to his acclaimed Constellation debut Third Album released in lockdown spring 2020, Markus Floats returns with Fourth Album, pushing the Montréal-based artist’s distinct abstract electronic compositions into newly evocative terrain (while preserving his record-titling literalism). 

“Death” never sounded so sweet!

I’m kidding, Jesus, calm down. In all seriousness, I can’t figure out why death is such a prevalent theme across this album when the songs themselves are buzzing with so much life-affirming, uh, life!

Markus (Lake) is one of Montréal’s most talented and creative musicians (period). And although this project is typically his solo venture, here on Fourth Album, he’s joined by three more folks I’d put on that very same list: James Goddard (sax, mbira), Ari Swan (violin), and Lucas Hwang (drums, guitar), aka The Egyptian Cotton Arkestra. So, so much life.

But why do I so easily default to the notion of dichotomy here? Life, death, opposites, binaries. But are they actually?

Perhaps those aren’t the inevitable ends of a timeline but a spectral gradient whereby all life, and all death, is at any given point some parts this and some parts that. Are we just perpetually set in motion, moving fluidly between states that incorporate elements of both?

The music on Fourth Album, like his previous Third Album, oscillates between textures plucky and smooth. Sometimes it’s a warm bath of aqueous tone shepherded in on the reed-tongue of Goddard’s brass echoing into invisible reverb tunnels and Swan’s wave vibrational fields resonating through wood fibres. At other times, those exact elements are flipped into rattling, chirping, plink-plonk toys.

The palette of colors here is as a result, brilliant and rich, bountifully benefitting from Lake’s masterful brushstrokes to bring it all together in a dreamy flow state (he is also a painter after all, and he did that one). This is kind of new territory for Lake — using live, acoustic instruments in his electronic compositions. Even though he studied Jazz and Electroacoustics, and he also plays bass, it’s not always a given that laptop-native digital composers will so fluidly blend and chisel MIDI binaries alongside acoustic waves. Although it does definitely help how well he knows his enlisted collaborators.

That said, Markus uses some old computer synthesis software I’ve never heard of. It’s fussy and it breaks down a lot. He makes things hard on himself (which I kind of appreciate) yet of course he makes it all sound so easy (which I also appreciate). I went back to listen to Third Album (a record I absolutely love) to see if there was any noticeable difference in that apparent deftness of hand.

Spoiler alert: there wasn’t. But Third Album now sounds so much more like a collection of isolated tracks in comparison to the uniformity and cohesion of Fourth Album.

“Kaleidoscopic” is a term often used to describe synthesis and the rainforest of signal permutations an artist may utilize across an album or performance work. That term could certainly fit here, but I think more than ever Lake’s work comes across as “painterly” here. In fact this record is as much Mark Fell as it is Ingram Marshall.

Just listen to “Death (pt. 2).”

Here, darkly foreboding 20th century minimalist string fogs eventually give way to flickering shadows of jazz, dancing across the apartment walls at dusk. The air is heavy, something’s been said that can’t be taken back. The air is humid and thick, but we’re alright, we got this. Nothing we haven’t heard before. Change is coming, maybe it’s already arrived and we can’t see it yet.

We’ll figure it out, we’ll work it out.

Poet and activist, walker of walks and talker of talks, Fred Moten, brings us in to this mindset to complete the song cycle in “C.” Lake samples Moten speaking in whirling linguistic dervishes, spun up, wound around, doubled down, unknotting himself as he does the thing: works out the phraseology of “working things out.”

“Let’s get together to see how we can figure it out, how we can work it out” eventually works itself out to become: “What we’ve been trying to figure out how to get to is how we are when we get together to try to figure it out.”

A beautiful, complicated tangle of tones and koans, glistening with an emotive patina, this track is. And the band is back. They’re glued together and dialed in, yet I can’t help but be left with the feeling that it’s all on the verge of going back up into smoke. That nothing, really, has been worked out or figured out at all.

Was this all a dream? Was it ever even real to begin with?

Listen and purchase here, please.