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Amidst a season of abundance and plenty here at the Alchemist Collective, we are proud and enthused to announce yet another forthcoming release, The Alpha Future, from I and I, aka the green-thumbed multi-instrumentalist and singer Adam Sarmiento. The Alpha Future continues down some of the paths blazed on I and I’s previous outings, bringing together the emphasis on texture and rhythm that characterizes electronic and dance elements with attention to lyrics and emotional timbres. Longtime I and I listeners will recognize these hybridizations – as well as Adam’s singularly expressive voice – but the record is not content to sit comfortably in the forward-looking terrain that I and I has mapped out in the past. It pushes forward in various ways…songs increasingly escape standard pop oriented song structures, tending instead to flow from contour to contour, anchored by refrains more than choruses and verses per se…the sounds conjoined here are often more like beds or soil horizons than the staccato clusters of discrete notes that punctuate much of I and I’s recent work…and the emotional tones struck here somehow seem both more attentive to profound sadness and fierce hope. Adam sings “Isolation…isolation…it is only…an illusion,” and the optimism of the line is at the same time tempered and strengthened by the delivery, the harmonic structure, and eventually the spare surroundings of its final refrain: it may be an illusion, but illusions can be hard to snap out of. Still, as the title reminds us, and standout track “The Hardest Part” makes explicit, “the things we hope for…just may come.”
‘The Alpha Future’ will be out May 31st on limited cd, tape and digital.

1. The Future Is Long
2. 1=1
3. Go
4. Soft Science
5. Should Have Been A Beekeeper
6. Headcleaner
7. Illusions
8. The Hardest Part
9. Jaws Of Life
10. Getting Rounder