Advanced Myth is the lucid debut album from Dialect, the long standing project of British composer, multi-instrumentalist, and field recordist Andrew PM Hunt. An enchanted exploration of unusual source synthesis, electroacoustic arrangements, and sound found in foreign environments, Advanced Myth is its own cosmos expanding and contracting in real time. Advanced Myth coincided with the creation of the Liverpool-based musician’s Dialect moniker, marking a more permanent uncoupling from the “frontman” dynamic Hunt wrestled with as part of Sophisti-pop band, Outfit. Happily unmoored ever since, Hunt has built a broad oeuvre with a quiet confidence across several album, including Gowanus Drifts (2015), Loose Blooms (2017), and Under ~ Between (2021), his debut for RVNG Intl., and its companion piece, Keep Going…Under.
In the absence of conventional structure, it’s these shifts in spirit that provide Advanced Myth’s emotive signposting, inspired in part by the likes of Laurie Spiegel’s The Expanding Universe and Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company, European kosmische, but also purely textural sonic ideas from ‘70s and ‘80s GRM through to contemporary ASMR. In truth, though, Advanced Myth is to be received as its own, and as a whole. Tracks, as they are, don’t start or stop, instead bleeding into each other, in support or rebuttal, gently persuading the mood into the shadows. It’s a record from which you can sonically draw lines to everything Dialect has gone on to, yet it also stands alone as a document that’s relative tranquility doesn’t mask the sense of excitement from an artist standing at the precipice of new creative boundaries.