Black to Comm to Release New Album 'At Zeenath Parallel Heavens' in October

For more than two decades, shapeshifting artist Black To Comm aka Marc Richter has pushed the limits of sound and merged the aesthetics of art, conceptual installations and music.

Through it all Richter as Black to Comm has challenged assumptions, explored identity and confronted the concept of authorship itself. New album At Zeenath Parallel Heavens, due out October 20th, highlights Richter once again as a prescient mind and essential voice in contemporary music.

The album pushes Richter's audio occultism to even more transcendent heights, investigating the bounds of originality, reinvention and recontextualizing sounds of the past, which in tandem with the growth and complications of AI, becomes ever more apropos and potent. 

At Zeenath Parallel Heavens finds Black to Comm contemplating the hybridity within each and every one of us,  and  mirrors personal dualities by employing a combination of sounds he created and manipulated samples. The sources were pushed to the extremes as he explored contrasts of these combined sonic palletes.

As Richter worked on the album, he became aware of how an AI text programs processing systems can resemble his own methods: “I had the realization recently that the way I compose is not too dissimilar to what AI software is doing nowadays - especially when the AI is hallucinating (this is the term used when the AI is overloaded/overcharged/inundated and comes up with made-up results).”

Human behavior reflected in a computer facsimile of human intelligence appealed to the ethos of Black to Comm, whose titles and concepts are often oblique and tongue-in- cheek.

Across the album’s dazzling expanse, Richter assembles an arresting sonic narrative that blossoms from primeval creation myths to ominous, shadowy expanses and radiant heavenly vistas, exploring the existence of alternative realities. It is as astounding in the scope of its vision as it is immediately enthralling, as inviting as it is subtly unnerving.

Alongside the new album announcement, Richter shares new single "Steep Thy Plumage in His Sweetness." Coalescing from weightless vapors, Richter demonstrates his sound sculpting mastery blending seraphic vocals and mellotron hum into an incorporeal melody that arcs atop warm drones and bristling distortion.  

Photo by Renate Nikolaus