Maxwell Sterling – Decay Time

On Turn Of Phrase Maxwell Sterling interpolates spatiotemporal displacement into highly emotional, richly textured sound design, feeding neoclassical instrumentation and arrangements into an experimental electronics centrifuge to distill a sound that is at once atmospherically expansive and technically rigorous. The album, released last year on AD 93, was recorded between the rural coastal town of Morecambe, Lancashire, Los Angeles and London, a geographical sprawl that is reflected in Sterling’s stretched and screwed sonics, which manifest a uniquely tangible sense of disorientation and dislocation. You recognise the spaces Sterling evokes with his music, though it is a recognition that develops tangentially to a certainty that these are places you have never been and will never be able to visit. It’s this anachronism, of space and time, of composition and process, that audiovisual artist Stephen McLaughlin teases out with his maximalist visual response to ‘Decay Time’, itself a distillation of the li