Minor Science—aka UK-born, Berlin-based musician Angus Finlayson—makes his Balmat debut with »Absent Friends Vol. III«, the third installment in a shape-shifting series across a variety of formats and platforms. And with it, he pushes forward his vision of ambient music as neither static vista or merely mood-setting atmosphere, but rather a dynamic matrix of textures, sensations, and even rhythms.

The first two volumes—a 2014 set for Blowing Up the Workshop, and a 2017 cassette and web player for Whities (now AD93)—were hybrid affairs, part DJ mix and part collage, mostly featuring music made by other people. Then, in 2020-21, Finlayson developed the project into a live show of his own material. Armed with hundreds of bespoke stems created in his studio—idiosyncratic FX chains, feedback loops through cheap rack gear, heavily post-processed field recordings, found voices, etc.—he would improvise on four CDJs, mixer, FX, and live synths, extending techniques he learned as a club DJ into a live context, accompanied by visuals by Stockholm-based artist Paul Witherden.

»Absent Friends Vol. III« is an album of studio versions of the music developed for the live show. But in Minor Science’s world, even a category as simple as ›studio versions‹ is slightly opaque. The album’s underlying themes include psychedelia and togetherness, universal cornerstones of virtually any experience of dance music.