Thin Walls by Holden Linton

Recorded over a 4 year period of 2021-2025 in North Philadelphia, PA, Thin Walls is an audio-physical playground of raw plastic covered in dust and broken wood. Sorely ruffled through piles of trash and eroding toys. Left to decay in spaces that exist nowhere, owned by no one.

The record was made utilizing abandoned apartments and a lineage of temporarily inhabited bedrooms to juxtapose each others environments. These spaces included their own dreams and memories, only to be found in union of their relation. One place bleeding into the other.

The abandoned apartments, being once owned by those that lived there, now sit as fractured and ruinous templates. Rotting capsules of who and what occupied these spaces. Left behind were lingering decorations, empty hallways, jagged walls, dusted toys, personal mixtapes, clothes, kitchen-ware, old electronics, broken furniture, even photos and written letters. Glimpses of personal lives and all that one would find within the corners of a home, was now forsaken and left to the deterioration of time. This was found next to the homes that I have traversed during that time with my own belongings and idea of home that I had collected my whole life. My stuffed animals, game consoles, instruments, photos, sculptures, toys, media, personal interests, furniture, and a miasma of collected objects that have brought significance to me. The collection and combination of these possessions were a genuine yet deceitful reflection of who I was and where I was.

For the years I was recording this record, I was a student in college. Every year during this time, I moved from one apartment to another, never finding true home and or the sense of permanence that I wanted. These homes were temporary, just a place to hold my belongings for a time being until I moved to the next place. Any sign of my inhabitation of the last place was erased and reimagined into the next. I had found myself increasingly alienated from what home was, if home was merely just a collection of personal objects that took up a given space. What was familiar and comforting, was equally claustrophobic and isolating.

Simultaneously, I was witnessing what felt to be the evermore present reflection of myself in the abandoned spaces I was going back to over and over again. I was the crooked floors, the barren hallways, the piles of photos and once tangible memories that were now just artifacts collecting dust. Once felt as material, but now just the scrapped essence of dreams in empty spaces. It felt as if moving through the labyrinth of my recessed self. Where what seemed to hold chaos, also held silence. When there was confusion and ambiguity, there was also clarity. Even in what felt like a confined space, there was also a sense of freedom.

This record was made with the very artifacts that inhabited these spaces, the physical spaces themselves, and my very being physically and spiritually. The walls, the doors, the video games, the bedrooms, the furniture, vents, the broken instruments, trash, the TV, my computer, the set of found household objects, the cheap audio equipment. You can hear sounds as small as microscopically peeling wood off furniture, to sounds as large as my body running through doors. Shrill as Glass scraping under guitars blaring through Bluetooth speakers, and jaded as game consoles glitching. Blunt as drawers being banged on and trash mangled into rhythms. Ghostly as music played into rooms and wind moving by microphones. Even the sounds of recording mediums breaking find their presence.

This amounts to an odyssey of fractured rock scrabblings, defunct bedroom sketches, trash collages, mental speedways, collapsing staircases, waiting rooms, lucid-dreams, perverted realities, stretched rugs with floral patterns covered in rubble, and angst-ridden compositions of an environment actively falling apart. A jagged yet reservedly aggressive audio experience beyond my own body and any ability to recreate such music. An observation of one self being separated from nature and seeking what it means to be human.

Recorded with my own personal field recorder, set of cheap microphones, and interface, while fully produced on my own computer within the spaces I was recording at, This record was made purely with all that I had.

An album that is seen as much as it can be heard, this record is part audio-document, part set of audio-installations, and part acousmatic experience. A 3-Dimensional experience meant solely to be heard through the very medium that it confronts.

Email: holdenlinton@proton.me

Website:
https://holdenlinton.neocities.org/