REES is the musical project of Adam Rees, artist and label operator born in the industrial town of Middlesbrough, North East England. Curious of everything surrounding him, Adam spends life captivated by science, experimentation and the unknown, continuously exploring new paths. This attribute translates through into his music, and after years of drifting through various forms his sound is an accumulation of his findings of the weird and wonderful. Now, Adam arrives at his debut album, Music For Stalagmites, a reflection of his mind and the fourth instalment on Magic Ritmo.
Music For Stalagmites is a slow-form, immersive album created around the patient growth of stalagmites. Born from Adam’s fascination with the natural world, the album conceptualises stalagmites as sentient beings, imagining sound as nourishment for their formation.
From the first fall of rain, to its permeation through the earth into a subsurface cave, water undergoes a chain of chemical reactions before reaching its hollow destination. The reacted solution accumulates on the ceiling, dripping down onto the desolate cave floor. Over millennia, evaporation occurs leaving a growing mass of calcite mineral deposits, better known as stalagmites and their ceiling counterpart, stalactites. Music For Stalagmites poetically embodies animism, placing soul, spirit and sentience into their evolution.
Moving at an unhurried pace, the music unfolds through layered synth sediment, gritty echoes, and distant field recordings that breathe like damp cave walls. Drawing from leftfield downtempo, dub, trance, ambient, electro, trip-hop, and the hazy afterglow of 90s chill-out rooms, boundaries are blurred in favour of mood and texture. Nothing rushes here, everything accumulates. The album moves between tension and release, grit and clarity, fusing both natural and industrial textures in equal measure to create a place where stone feels alive. Music for places without light, for movements too slow to witness.
