TIM.EXP-017 - Sun Picture - The Snow-Rat Audio Tape - CS

Venezuelan-American musician & Chicagoan Carlos Lowenstein started his instrumental home-studio project ‘Sun Picture’ last year in the middle of the pandemic, recording and releasing two albums; ‘Hello and Walk Together’ & ‘So Many Little Rooms’. Lowenstein makes his TiM debut here with his newest, “The Snow-Rat Audio Tape” a concept album that evolved from a chance encounter last winter. Lowenstein explains; “Sometime in the middle of last winter, I was walking down a Chicago alley when I was stopped by a sad-looking rat, slowly trudging through the snow towards the icy garbage.  It had been a year of anxiety, disease, and death and something about this animal’s demeanor seemed to fit the moment.  Looking back, I’m not even certain this encounter even happened.  I might have conjured it as I worked on this repetitive music.  But one way or another, Snow-Rat became my muse.” ‘The Snow-Rat Audio Tape’ certainly conveys an aura of bleakness & winter, with Lowenstein’s greyscale’d and repetitive melodies (sometimes created by guitars, synths, or ambient sounds) coming into focus & then withering away, with the marrow sucked dry by forces internal and external. The perfect soundtrack to the forthcoming snowpocalypse.

All instruments / recording by Carlos Lowenstein