III provides a head-nodding journey with parts that work for after-hours dance floors as well as the headphones of those seeking centering and focus. Shanahan’s experience and talent makes the output feel as natural as breathing, but it’s the product of years of hard work, informed by his heart’s journey.
Shanahan’s experience and talent makes the output feel as natural as breathing
> aus·cul·ta·tion
> /ˌôskəlˈtāSHən/
> (noun) The action of listening to sounds from the heart, lungs, or other organs, typically with a stethoscope, as a part of medical diagnosis.
With the definition of auscultation in mind, the six tracks that unfold on Auscultation’s release III become easier to analyze: they are the sounds from producer Joel Shanahan’s heart, expressed through the medium of leftfield techno. Indeed, the first track alludes to this in its title: “Growing Hearts in the Rainbow Room,” where spaced-out pads and washes sit over a kick pattern like of a heart working at 140bpm. As the track develops, so do the emotions: a propulsive bassline, delicate melodic synths, and a high-tempo IDM runout on the back half. This sets the stage for the rest of the release, where ambient passages interlock with uptempo rhythms to divine a diagnosis of centering and transcendence.
In addition to III, Shanahan released 2015’s L’étreinte Imaginaire and III‘s predecessor II (under his Golden Donna alias) on Britt and Amanda Brown’s 100% Silk label. I tend to think of 100% Silk as being a straight-ahead dance label because I indelibly associate them with folks like Octo Octa, Ital, and Jupiter Jax, but this release fits into the emotive, expressive range found across the roster. Joel describes his relationship with the label: “I’ve been working with Not Not Fun and 100% Silk since 2012. I was a huge fan of both labels, owned and loved tons of music. I was like, “what the hell, I’ll try sending it to Silk and see what happens.” I honestly didn’t expect to hear back and was frankly in awe when they came back to me and offered to do a record for Not Not Fun… I think Silk makes sense to me in the same way that my own music does. It’s impossible to explain, but I just kind of inherently feel the thing that Britt and Amanda have found in so many of the artists they’ve worked with.”
Track two, “Flottant,” brings this connection home with its downtempo, tech-house vibe that plays a swinging bassline off a piercing string line, bringing to mind an intimate party winding down, after the doors are locked to the outside world. “Purgatory Sway” follows with a rougher breakbeat, building with warped funhouse effects; it’s kind of brief interlude between these longer, epic tracks—”Turn Down These Voices” clocks in next at over seven minutes, with a Basic Channel style dub-techno shuffle underpinning delicate, delayed synth loops that swirl and coalesce around indistinct, uplifting vocal samples. This is Auscultation in its purest form: an emotive dive into the heart, driven by club sensibilities and elevated with style and technique. With respect to the production process, Joel provides some backstory on how these tracks get built: “I spend a bunch of time trying to build a skeleton that feels inhabitable, something I don’t feel fatigued by after a few passes. Then I set up a ton of processing, lay it down in a live take, and do all of the processing on the fly. This isn’t a hard rule, but it has been my approach to several Auscultation songs.”
I’ve had the good fortune to see Shanahan perform live a few times and that experience is well-represented in “Fool,” the longest track (at 9:11) on the release and perhaps the best representation of that creative process: deep loops built on hardware, aimed at the dance floor, but informed by years of experience in the studio and proverbial woodshed. The hard-hitting, complex drum tracks are complemented by spaced-out synths that build up and break down, inducing that cardiac groove implied by the project’s name. Shanahan explains, “(that track) is kind of an anomaly in that I wrote it for a Golden Donna performance in St Louis a few years ago, but the mood and the essence of Auscultation was in there, so it crossed over. It’s definitely the most functional “dance” track on the album.”
Appropriately, the release closes out with a track entitled “Exit,” a moody, ambient piece that features deep delay-effected synths overlapping and interlocking to let us down gently after the epic journey of the previous 50 minutes.
In total, Auscultation’s III provides a head-nodding journey with parts that work for after-hours dance floors as well as the headphones of those seeking centering and focus. Shanahan’s experience and talent makes the output feel as natural as breathing, but it’s the product of years of hard work, informed by his heart’s journey.
III is available on 100% Silk on May 8, 2020.
