The contemporary world is constantly interjected with unexpected bursts of transcendent beauty and abject horror, both stemming from increasingly fragmented, unpredictable sources. “This is just what the inside of my head sounds like these days,” Chapman says with a knowing smile. “Beauty for beauty’s sake becomes increasingly mundane until something hideous happens and makes you look at it differently.”
Constructed entirely from found samples, the world of Angel Smile is as synthetic as it is organic, as familiar as it is alien, as structured as it is amorphous, as lonely as it is uplifting. Disparate elements float in and out of focus, sometimes crystalizing into moments of revelatory clarity, sometimes drifting off like a dream you can’t fully recall. Its sonic world is mesh-like and built from the ground up, with each component like a piece of a puzzle that dissolves as soon as you find the space it fits into.
Angel Smile was composed and assembled over three busy years for Chapman. Shortly following the release of his lush and tragic debut LP Indentations (released with UK left-field mainstays Métron Records), Chapman found himself caught between worlds. Underneath the
newfound satisfaction and respect he had found in creating remarkably dynamic, plunder-phonic music, it was all decidedly ambient – Chapman is a percussionist through and through, and he could never be fully satisfied with music that lacks a certain muscularity.