Rival Consoles, aka Ryan Lee West, will release his ninth studio album, Landscape from Memory on July 4 via Erased Tapes. The label have released a new single, Known Shape, ahead of a pre-album tour across Europe.

Talking about the track, West said “I’ve always been obsessed by controls on machines because they produce beautiful sounds and they have their own rhythms. The drums are made from rotating switches and the synths are set in motion by invisible mechanical rhythms. Machines have a special connection to the human spirit, which is both good and bad but above all restless. There is a constant searching in Known Shape for some kind of answer or emotion.”

Known Shape is a relatively understated piece of music, but compelling too – the beats describing the mechanical processes flit across the stereo picture, while snippets of melody drift in, as though the listener is hearing a piece of music on the other side of a door.

The piece is accompanied by a graphical score West created, shown below:

Published post no.2,514 – Thursday 14 April 2025