Artist
People Skills
Several Years Later
Discreet Music
/
2026
LP
€24.99
DM35
Edition of 300 copies, kraftboard sleeve with paste-on artwork, insert.
Incl. VAT plus shipping / Orders from outside the EU are exempt from VAT
Tracklist
1People Skills - Several Years Later - 01 Four Curling Corners Of Your Soul 11:40
2People Skills - Several Years Later - 02 Illegible Scroll 1:04
3People Skills - Several Years Later - 03 Fell Awake 4:30
4People Skills - Several Years Later - 04 So Swallowed To Be Small 2:54
5People Skills - Several Years Later - 05 Just In Time For The Street Fight 3:02
6People Skills - Several Years Later - 06 Subjectivity 4:19
7People Skills - Several Years Later - 07 Glue Factory (Exegesis Of The Futile Joke)2:24
8People Skills - Several Years Later - 08 Several Years Later 6:45
9People Skills - Several Years Later - 09 The Sculptor 3:30

»There are people who stumble into sound the way certain rivers find the sea, People Skills belongs to that happy camp of bedroom dreamers. Since the mid 2000s he's been pulling repetitive guitar figures, idle tape phenomena, sound residue, and deep buried vocals into forms that feel hallucinated rather than composed. His Heresy Museum locale the ship by which these vexed transmissions sail. Sunken, yet somehow floating, paced with the tide, surprising, and sitting just outside both the listener and it seems the artist himself. For years, his late father's untrained photography has completed the fractured scene, pulling two parallel streams of private evidence toward the same unknown, and this document sticks to the same shadowy form.

Nine pieces, no unnecessary movement. The trademark Discreet's »beauty and grit« sit side by side throughout. The opening eleven minute epic, »Four Curling Corners of Your Soul«, gently kicks this door open with the sound of an approaching storm trapped inside a ballad. What follows, beyond a reportedly »tart nod at Bataille on Lascaux«, is a guitar album like a refrigerator cycling through signals from a distant shortwave station. Lost instruments circling themselves without urgency. Voices drift in and out, in and out. Rooms of the cave open into other rooms that open into other rooms... Before long, the distinction between the foreground and the myth of its imagery stops mattering entirely. Anyone still talking about »lo-fi aesthetics« in 2026 can safely be ignored. This music concertedly sits outside category. It moves nearby a strain of homemade music that values intuition over intention, happy accidents over polish, and patient repetition over hurried destination, and Aaens belongs to that world, but he seems to have arrived there without consulting the guidebook or the tired committees forever gesturing at its containment.« – J.T.D. Cusamano

Photographs from the Alfred P. Sebastian Archives 1969–1995 »The Sculptor« written and recorded 2016, the rest performed and recorded by Jesse Dewlow in winter 2024–2025 in Philadelphia, PA Mixed, compiled, and completed by Samael B. Aaens summer 2026 in Vilnius, LT Mastered by Lasse Marhaug