Zach Rowden (Tongue Depressor) with support from Heavy Lifting

Zach Rowden is a musician based in New Haven, Connecticut. His work is focused in the areas of drone, repetitive structures and noise. Collaborators and projects include - Tongue Depressor, Hyperion Ensemble/Iancu Dumitrescu, Windscour, Red Yellow Blue Green Black, Leila Bordreuil, Aki Onda, Arien Wilkerson, and Paul Flaherty.

Touring to support his new album "Time Unstated, Hues Unseen".

A tape loop repeating, posing mundane questions to the listener: "Am I different because you are different from one moment to the next; or, am I different because I am different from myself from one moment to the next?" It is hard to tell. The ebb and flow of difference and repetition always produces a psychedelic interrogation. Where were you when you first heard me? Who were you when you first heard me? Are you still there? Are you still the same person? Breathing in and out is sort of similar. Something we do continuously as a matter of survival. One breath is not so different from the next, but each breath is also a seemingly singular event, a repetition bleeding into its own repetition. Is listening any different? One sound bleeding into the next, as if beginnings and endings fail to matter. These cycles have always existed in one way or another. All points of discontinuity are an illusion hiding a fundamental continuity that is also always different from itself. Tape loop as metaphor for Being.

Zach Rowden’s (Tongue Depressor, Red Yellow Blue Green Black, Lead Mask, Wind Scour, Crazy Doberman, et al) 𝘛𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘜𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘥, 𝘏𝘶𝘦𝘴 𝘜𝘯𝘴𝘦𝘦𝘯 gestures towards these abstractions. An album of repeating fits and starts; a broken machine of repetition and difference dissolving into infinity. Moments of beauty, imperfection, and vacuity, hanging together like old friends reconnecting after a few years of separation. The friends retell the same stories and jokes over and over; each time it hits a little different. Sometimes laughter. Sometimes tears. The embodiment of a locked groove. These recordings were generated by harnessing previously made recordings from Rowden’s archive or found scraps of other people’s old tapes. Recorded from 2024-2025, it marks a particularly scathing and uncanny period of Rowden’s life. Yet, it exhibits a supreme focus and patience, reflective of his continuous practice and refinement of magnetic tape manipulations.

Heavy Lifting is Lucy using code to subdivide samples to the nth degree. She is also in bands Epiploke, TRVE YORKSHIRE KVLT ENSEMBLE and P Foundation. At Bishop's house she will be performing using an unfinished text editor built with a game engine (spoiler: it will crash). For updates consider subscribing to her (sporadic) newsletter: https://buttondown.com/heavy-lifting

Listen to Heavy Lifting Live at Wharf Chambers: https://on.soundcloud.com/ryuFKb7m05NTu097Re