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It gives me great pleasure to present Sever, the third solo album by San Francisco-based composer Jim Haynes, whose singular music evades simple attempts to describe it. The process of decaying and wearing down materials is implied in Sever; its passages of rough clang and cyclic scraping metal seem implacably tangible, as if one is witnessing time-lapsed erosion in action. For me, Sever conjures images of oncoming storms, abandoned industrial sites, huge empty warehouses, creaking glass, ships rocking in a port, the middle of the ocean far from land. Sever is an engaging album of evocative, highly visual drone music made up of layers upon organic layers that are in constant motion, and yet seem somehow still.

Jim Haynes has exhibited at Westspace (Melbourne, Australia), Diapason (New York), Jack Straw Productions (Seattle), and Works (San Jose), Eyedrum (Atlanta). He has collaborated with Loren Chasse (as the duo Coelacanth), Keith Evans, Steve Stapleton (Nurse With Wound), and irr.app.(ext.). He runs the acclaimed Helen Scarsdale label, and works as the Editorial Director for 23five, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the development and increased awareness of sound arts within the public arena. He has written extensively on sound art, noise culture, minimalism, and general music experimentation for The Wire, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, Metro Pulse, and Chunklet.

Praise for Sever:

“American genius Jim Haynes (presents) a grand collection of opaque and compelling field recording music in the slow mode.” – Ed Pinsett, Sound Projector

“Seemingly not concerned with consonance or dissonance, or tonality or atonality, Haynes focuses (almost obsessively) on texture. He goes in for the tangible (scraped objects and field recordings), the invisible (shortwave radio static) and the sonically feral (feedback). But if texture is Haynes’ obsession, then its intricate arrangement is his ballast, his way of grounding his abstract language so it remains accessible to a listener. Taking the drone as his musical template, he collapses the natural world, machine sounds, and human-made rustling in on each other. The sources of sounds remain unknown yet not totally unfamiliar. Natural processes and phenomena come to mind (storms and ocean tides, in particular), as do the omnipresent hum and activity of the natural and built environment. But Haynes makes all of these phenomena sound as if they are one, smelting them into his fictitious field recordings and processing them with the dream logic of the sub-conscious, turning over yet another rock for us. Very cool, indeed.” – Matthew Wuethrich, Dusted Magazine

Haynes has taken you to the peak where organic and inorganic is indistinguishable from pure sound. He then goes on to meditate for the next two tracks until he reaches the finale: a seemingly endless voyage into the pure ambient abyss.” – Christopher Sauchak, Junkmedia.org

“More than just a collection of unnerving ambiance, (Sever) is a psychologically heavy record with plenty of gloom and despair to go around. While the narrative of decay and time run a red thread through this record, there’s also a feeling of dread and expectancy coursing through it. Haynes’ environments have an emptiness attached to them, as though they are waiting for something or someone to come along and fill them up. As a result, a great deal of anticipation and tense nervousness finds its way onto this record. Perhaps Sever‘s focus on decay is the source of this discomfort. Or perhaps the music renders the void of decomposition and death too effectively; either way, a loneliness and an increasing sense of helplessness builds up over the record’s 52 minutes. Powerful and unique and entirely worth experiencing.” – Lucas Schleicher, Brainwashed