Com Truise: Iteration (2LP) [GHOSTLY INTERNATIONAL]

Why you'll love it

This Ghostly International 2LP set comes with a download card. Iteration reached the top ten of Billboard's Dance/Electronic Albums and Heatseekers charts, and some critics called it Seth Haley's best record yet.

This edition

• 2LP set
• Download card included

About the album

Every space opera needs a final act. Seth Haley had spent a run of records telling the story of Com Truise, a fictional astronaut, and Iteration wraps it up with our hero fleeing the planet Wave 1 with his alien lover to live in peace among the stars. Haley picked the title as a smirk at how repetitive electronic music can be.

Burned out from touring and homesick in Los Angeles, he moved his studio to Burbank for more open space and swapped software for outboard gear, and the album sounds roomier and simpler than his earlier work. "...Of Your Fake Dimension" opens with Cocteau Twins-style guitar, "Dryswch" is a choir of synths singing Truise back to life, "Memory" is upbeat robot funk, and "Propagation" is a slow ballad played on an ARP Odyssey, an OB-6 and a Yamaha DX7. "When Will You Find The Limit..." plays the credits before the Oberheim-heavy title track closes the story.

"Propagation" got a video starring Trieste Kelly Dunn as a wife-bot slowly becoming self-aware. Haley says the ending stays a little open, so there's hope for the astronaut yet, which is more than can be said for most of the synths in our back room.

Also at Kops: more Com Truise on vinyl · browse Electronic

Tracklist

Listen

On Ghostly International (cat# GI-296), the 2017 album.