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The follow-up to his acclaimed Constellation debut Third Album released in lockdown spring2020, Markus Floats returns with Fourth Album, pushing the Montréal-based artist's distinctabstract electronic compositions into newly evocative terrain (while preserving his recordtitling literalism). Faced with another couple of years spent unexpectedly, though notunfamiliarly, secluded and studio-bound, working on both paintings and music, Floatsemerged by the end of 2022 with a set of tracks Inchabout 60% finishedInch and a determineddesire to throw off the shackles of distancing and isolation. InchI had always thought aboutMarkus Floats as a solo project but I am wrong about that. Fourth Album is about asking forhelp, inviting in, and making a home. It's about trust, exploration, and the effort of letting go.InchSharing his in-progress recordings with a trio of close friends and collaborators from thepowerhouse free music ensemble Egyptian Cotton Arkestra, each of these players then spent aday improvising to the tracks at Montréal's Hotel2Tango studio. With violin by Ari Swan,saxophone and mbira by James Goddard, and guitar and drums by Lucas Huang, Floatsstitched their extemporized instruments back into his compositional process. The result is afluid, lustrous, dynamic expansion of his sound and structure that continues to strike theineffable balance of abstraction and soulfulness rightly highlighted and celebrated in thecritical response to Third Album. Fourth Album sustains much of that previous work'senchanting equanimity, while inviting a bit more restlessness, accident and grit, with theincorporation of acoustic instruments and improvisation melding Floats' own background inElectroacoustic Studies and Jazz Performance more than ever before.Signature avant-electronic explorations of arpeggiated and timbral transformation, subtleshifts in harmonic consonance and dissonan
