Swiss artist Nelson Beer has unveiled his latest double A-side single ‘Orlando / In Defense of the Unheard’ via PIAS. Both tracks are taken from his forthcoming Orlando EP, scheduled to land this spring.

The first track ‘Orlando’, is a hazy, spacey offering that is built on this thick wall of almost claustophic sound design laid over punchy drums that is utterly mesmeric and almost frazzling in the same breath.

‘In Defense of the Unheard’ is a minimal spoken word piece which features Olamiju Fajemisin reading the nineteenth verse of Vito Acconci’s ‘Public Space in a Private Time’. With nothing more than improvisational piano play and field recordings, the track is a stunning and effective piece of work.

Stream both ‘Orlando’ and ‘In Defense of the Unheard’ below.

Touching on the upcoming EP, Nelson Beer mentioned:

“Orlando marks the continuity of my research around the question of identity politics. Here the role of the composer and the performer in the contemporary socio-cultural context is questioned. I am looking for an artistic manoeuvre that, without excluding it, is critical of the global industry and suggests that it endangers human rights in its persistence. Orlando – the sound and the character – as in Virginia Woolf’s eponymous work, becomes a piece of evidence to the chaotic world order.

Orlando was composed with the idea of using sound as a means of archiving the present and as a fluid archive of history. I have been inspired by different Western European traditions in the use of the diatonic and pentatonic major scale (folk), thirds (country) and recording techniques such as field recording and binoral microphones (musique concrète, electro-acoustic music). I have also been influenced by classical music from South Asia where the space between notes is often more important than the notes themselves, such as the khali in Indian tala which is a specific notation for ghost notes.”