<a href="http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Anthem-Cover-1000px.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-14609" src="http://www.hiddenshoal.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Anthem-Cover-1000px-300x300.jpg" alt="Arc Lab &quot;Anthem&quot;" width="200" height="200" /></a>Hidden Shoal is proud to announce the release of <a title="Anthem" href="https://medardfischer.bandcamp.com/album/anthem"><em>Anthem</em></a>, the brilliant new album by <a title="Arc Lab" href="http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/arc-lab/">Arc Lab</a>. To coincide with the release we also have the wonderful new music video for album track 'The Refracting Glass' to share with you.

After years away, Medard Fischer’s Arc Lab project returns with <em>Anthem</em>, a retrofuturistic sci-fi travelogue. Folding classic analogue timbres and detuned FM ambience over fragmented radio broadcasts, forgotten NASA program materials and layers of deep space noise, Anthem is in turns menacing and contemplative, forbidding and epic. The album shifts between claustrophobic tension and widescreen, cinematic expanse. Crushes of static and thundering percussion sit alongside diminutive synth studies, all plotted against an almost palpable narrative of anxiety, struggle and, ultimately, salvation. It’s the grandeur of classic space opera, refracting darkly through a contemporary lens.

<em>“…one of the most original releases in the IDM field in some time…confounding the set-in-stone rules of a stagnant IDM genre”</em> – <strong>[sic] Magazine on Arc Lab's <em>The Goodbye Radio</em></strong>

Arc Lab is Hidden Shoal artist <a title="Medard Fischer" href="http://www.hiddenshoal.com/project/medard-fischer/">Medard Fischer</a>’s primary vehicle for musical experimentation – a blank-slate platform on which he has released a diverse catalogue of emotive, conceptual work. Eschewing easy genre classification, Fischer’s output as Arc Lab effectively blends IDM’s technical sophistication with the moving and poignant character of neo-classical ambience and a finely tuned ear for electroacoustic pop. Anthem comes after an almost 8-year hiatus following Arc Lab’s brilliant 2008 album The Goodbye Radio (n5MD), described as “‘genre-defying’ or, perhaps most appropriately, ‘genre-transcending’” (Textura) and as “one of the most original releases in the IDM field in some time” and “downright ingenious” ([sic] Magazine).

<em>Anthem</em> is available now via <a title="Bandcamp" href="https://medardfischer.bandcamp.com/album/anthem">BandCamp</a> and all good online stores. Check out the beautiful music video for 'The Refracting Glass' over at <a title="The Refracting Glass" href="https://youtu.be/z6w8WVXD5Uc" target="_blank">YouTube</a>.

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