On Apex Ideals, Montreal-based Francesco De Gallo creates a very pristine form of ambient sculpture from shards of contorted digital audio hosed down with incandescent synth finish. Over the last few years, De Gallo has established himself within the growing community of tape labels focused on textural ambience, now he makes his debut on vinyl.

Structures in Stasis initiates the album with the splintered mp3-shiver of a human voice. Percussive clicks and sub thumps swarm onto the drifting vocal sample in a rapid but unsteady pattern until the composition u-turns and a crystalline synth blows the successive parts away with a hypothermic gust. De Gallo’s vision is both precise and anomalous. He spends a great deal of the album building from coarse digital wreckage: mechanical glitches, electrical blips, ghost-in-the-machine drone of digital feedback. Yet despite his palette of digital accidents, De Gallo has stated that his goal for the album was to strive for a hi-fi clarity. As he told Adhoc, “Apex Ideals as an album, for me– it’s still the idea of transitioning and the high point, just because it was me transitioning from the tape world into the vinyl world… That’s why I started working with friends of mine to help me focus the whole vision a little bit more and get the sound a little higher quality than just tape sound.” The result succeeds in teasing out subtle shades from the abstract figures that litter each song’s synthetic cryosphere. They glisten with immaculate clarity while feeling wholly unfamiliar; it’s sort of like beaming into a virtual reality that has degenerated into a dystopia.

Get the wax here.