Rival Consoles shares “Known Shape” single | ‘Landscape from Memory’ LP out 7/4 via Erased Tapes

Rival Consoles, UK producer Ryan Lee West, will release his ninth studio album, Landscape from Memory, on July 4 via Erased Tapes. Today, he is sharing his new single, “Known Shape.” Rival Consoles is also set to embark on a special pre-album release tour across Europe next month, which includes London, Glasgow, Leeds, and Dublin.

On the track, West says, “I’ve always been obsessed with controls on machines because they produce beautiful sounds and have their own rhythms. The drums are made from rotating switches and the synths are set in motion by invisible mechanical rhythms. Machines have a special connection to the human spirit, which is both good and bad but above all restless. There is a constant searching in ‘Known Shape’ for some kind of answer or emotion.”

The piece is accompanied by a graphical score West created:

Rival Consoles has been concurrently in the foreground and background of electronic music since the late 00s, conjuring tense melancholia for Black Mirror soundtracks, playing in front of 10,000 dance fans at Drumsheds, selling out London’s Barbican Hall, and logging an expansive, wandering collection of synth-sculpted albums that explore a myriad different styles and aesthetics—but always with human emotion as their lodestar. Landscape from Memory, the ninth studio LP from the UK producer and musician born Ryan Lee West, finally blossomed following a frustrating fallow year away from the production desk. For West, having spent the past decade producing and writing habitually, falling out of love with creativity meant a slowing of the clock that makes him tick, a sense of being swallowed whole by some elementary force. However, the time out also made room for his most invigorating record.

Partly stitched together from a scrapbook of discarded audio snippets, Landscape from Memory demanded a degree of openness and vulnerability in its assembly. “There is a kind of strange beauty to it because it involves the past, present and future in a very strong way,” offers the Erased Tapes mainstay. He set to work massaging melodic kernels into full tracks, like the skippy, haunted club shuffle of memory-jogging lead single “Catherine,” which is dedicated to his partner. “It’s extremely open, just a naked melody on drums, so exposed as an idea… I think because she was so excited by it, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m excited too, actually, I just didn’t realise,” he reflects.

Appropriately, the title track became the first piece of music that made West “feel an emotional reaction after a long time of having zero reaction”—closing the record transcendently in a fever dream of euphoric synth-wave—although “Catherine” can be understood as the spark that lit the fuse, bristling with energetic joy. 

Similarly, “Known Shape” makes a play for an otherworldly dance floor, melding a loping drum pattern to a twitchy soundscape. Granted, some of the standout moments of the LP can be found lurking in its weirder, wilder corners, from the broken-sounding synth that runs like a rough river through “2 Forms,” to the head-nodding, disembodied bounce of uncanny valley bop “In a Trance.” “I remember making that in a New York hotel room, starting it, when Robert (Raths, Erased Tapes founder) was doing something on his phone and I was just being annoying in the background,” recalls West of one of several pieces made on the road. Yet Raths expressed his excitement about the track as he was hooked instantly.

“I like music that has a sense of momentum, really pushing forward,” he adds of the Landscape from Memory ice-breaker. “And it just instantly has that from the first breath. So I kind of like moments like that when they appear.”

These climatic productions are characterized by their propulsive quality and driven by West’s push to step outside his comfort zone, having found inspiration flowing from new and unfamiliar sources. After his self-built Hackney studio suddenly felt too controlled of an environment, West altered course, mapping out tracks away from his desk. To that end, Landscape from Memory is a travelogue of creativity on the move, a collection of postcards from everywhere, and an album defined by its restlessness.

Growing up, West would often mess around with the materials on his parents’ land in the small town of Syston outside of Leicester, hammering nails into wood and “sawing stuff,” which ignited an intense curiosity for making materials from childhood. He soon found his way into music, starting on the guitar before teaching himself digital production and going on to study music technology at Leicester’s De Montfort University. He later became the first signee to the nascent London label Erased Tapes in 2007, establishing the label’s shorthand for exploratory post-minimalism. IO, his debut album as Rival Consoles, came out in 2009, while his output has since evolved across nearly two decades of activity, from the critically acclaimed 2018 offering Persona to Landscape from Memory’s 2022 predecessor, Now Is.

As a multidisciplinary artist, he has always been passionate about imagery and how it relates to and inspires music. His 2020 record Articulation was informed by drawings he made in his sketchbook. He has also been experimenting with various motion media, from programming particle animations in Max MSP to filming and editing daily video clips and manipulating imagery in Touchdesigner or Blender, which would shape the visual counterpart in his live A/V shows since 2015.

As Rival Consoles, West’s calling card is his ability to channel hope, pain, sadness, and euphoria in one fell swoop, twisting the key in the lock of his internal world and telling stories without words. Crucially, Landscape from Memory is as much about zooming in on the details as seeing past the horizon. Like a saturated photograph or an abstract painting daubed with bright splotches, Landscape from Memory is a riot of color, an album blazing with a sound-shaper’s renewed love for his craft.

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