Alexander started work on Cast when living in Berlin and in Queens. “I hit a wall listening to these tracks when they were instrumental.” This is where he diverged from previous modes, deciding to integrate speech.

With a healthy distaste for aspects of performance art, he invited strictly non-scripted recordings, a series of anti-performances. This new format adds a surprising human element to music that has previously operated as sea-shapes or infrastructure. These flashes of language, Alexander’s close friends speaking about things, narratively and cerebrally, casually and profoundly, turn the distinctive Heathered Pearls sound into something surprisingly gritty, tangible, and in certain sweeps, cinematic.

It is as if the world outside of these compositions bleeds into the music, casting their verbal being from just off the surface, like the album’s cover artwork where the light hits the plexi object but misses the wall. Alexander sees his covers as naturally unfinished workstations; the gauzed and patinaed copper on Cast continues in this philosophy. This is all to say Cast deals with absence as much a presence.

Vinyl