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about this album
After John Roberts became the first American artist on the Dial Records imprint in 2008, it took almost two years to finish his first album. "Glass Eights" debuts a sound impeccably curated and delicately enigmatic, recreating real house music. With its contemplative instrumental weave, the album asks broader cultural questions about the psychological function of music as it blurs distinctions between sublimation and expression, escape and confrontation, medication and symptom, repression and reserve. The electric and grand piano, organ, violin, modular synthesizers and eclectic percussion split, shatter and reform, disclosing an aesthetic sensibility which delicately reflects on the eerie stillness of a grey day, the repetition of a single note on a detuned upright piano, a deflated balloon, the white of a funeral arrangement, exhibiting a kind of discrete, perverse hopefulness. Complicating melancholy, the emptiness of a mechanized loop serves to reveal a particular humaneness, caused by a percussive rapping, shattering into slow-motion, or an off-keyed drunken note of a piano begins to sound strangely in tune, finding itself transmuted into something more obscure, potent, and hard hitting. Rendering awkwardness enigmatic and anxiety beautiful, effectively, Roberts questions if there is not something more natural, more human, in the hesitation of a clap that rings a moment too late. The album's interior reserve heightens the potency of its immaculate transitions, which ha
