Niagara: New Album on Monotreme Records

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Turin-based experimental-pop pioneers David Tomat and Gabriele Ottino return as Niagara for their third album, 'Hyperocean', out April 29th via Monotreme Records.

Still retaining the band's trademark pop edge, it is Niagara's most experimental effort to date, combining alternative electronica, dark-tinted psychedelia and funk, with sweeping arrangements complimenting spluttering rhythms and booming electronics, akin to digital alt-pop peers Lapalux, Mount Kimbie and Nosaj Thing. The Italian duo have always had a driving concept behind their albums. Where their 2014 offering 'Don't Take it Personally' focused on the struggle between technology and nature, 'Hyperocean' has allowed the band to conceptualise something that has inspired them from the start of their musical careers: Water. "Water is also the element from which Niagara started as a project, and so we felt the need to go back there to our beginning, to what really inspired us emotionally", Tomat and Ottino explain. "Hyperocean is a pluri-dimensional planet almost completely covered in water. It changes continuously, reacting with whoever is visiting it by switching from one number of dimensions to another" At every turn the record is sonically considered; not only in concept, water also plays a central role in the production of the album, featuring hydrophone-recorded samples that help shape their "imaginary world made of water" .

'Hyperocean' presents 11 expansive landscapes that sculpt Niagara's oceanic world. Ebbing and flowing between the eerie calm of 'Drift' and the violent, visceral waves of 'Roger Water', it shifts itself into new forms, like water itself. Opener 'Mizu', an eerie descent into unchartered territory, sets a fluid pace for the album, which surfaces for breath only at the delicate 'Firefly' before submerging again into a realm of aquatic ambience, decorated with textured synths and fluid basslines. Explosive cuts 'Escher Surfers' and 'Solar Valley' force the running order to flow between moments of serenity and calamity, much like the unpredictable nature of the seas, and the epic 'Alfa 11' slowly transforms into an all-encompassing, grandiose conclusion.

'Hyperocean' will be available on the 29th April on digital formats, CD and as a limited edition of 500 180 g vinyl LPs, (300 clear and 200 black) including a free album CD inside.

Remixes for their previous album included contributions by Liars, Gonjasufi and Acid Pauli, and we can expect further inspired collaborations to emerge from Hyperocean.

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