Dialect

Dialect is the long standing solo project of British musician and composer Andrew PM Hunt. Embracing an intuitive, collage-like approach to sound, Hunt assembles rich organic textures with evocative electro-acoustic environments, resulting in compositions that are both fragmented and deeply personal. Following a progression of concept-rich releases across almost a decade, Dialect marks a return to RVNG Intl. in 2024 with Atlas of Green, a work of speculative musical poetry melding a patchwork of scavenged relics and bygone hues through the shimmers of a mid-future in flux.

The early origins of Dialect can be prospected through Hunt’s immersion in the culture of playing in underground bands while growing up on the Wirral Peninsula in North West England. This DIY ethos ensued as Hunt naturally gravitated towards a personal studio practice as a way of processing his myriad musical and non-musical influences, using instruments as tools to construct intimate musical worlds. In 2015, Hunt released his lucid debut offering as Dialect, Advanced Myth, an expansive cosmos of unusual source synthesis and found sound, originally on the net imprint Tasty Morsels and reissued by RVNG and Warm Winters, Ltd. in 2022. Subsequent releases followed on the now defunct Canadian label 1080p Collection and Dense Truth, a label run by fellow Wirral musician Forest Swords for whom Hunt plays saxophone in his live band. Hunt is also a member of the Liverpool-based minimalist quartet Ex-Easter Island Head, in which he plays and acts as producer.

Nurturing new gradients between improvisation and composition, Dialect navigates the realms of narrative and pure sensation, grounding his material by prioritizing emotional depth and resonance. “I’m interested in achieving a balance of design and chance in my music, inspired by natural processes,” Hunt says. His 2021 album Under~Between is imbued with the indeterminate energies of digital processing, cast across a rich cross-pollination of acoustic, synthetic and vocal invocations, cultivating and evolving the tracks beyond their original life cycle as chamber pieces commissioned by the Merseyside’s Immix Ensemble.

Often inspired by literature as a way of organizing his musical impulses, Hunt is drawn to ideas around circular time, spirituality and ecology. His burgeoning interest in the fantasy writing of Ursula K. Le Guin and Gene Wolfe, as well as the work of Italian philosopher Federico Campagna, has fed into the ever-expanding mythologies and magic of Dialect’s sonic sphere. With his arrival at Atlas of Green in 2024, Dialect elegantly molds unexacting details of memory and mistranslation, as the album imagines a young musician named Green working in a future era, where lost signals and enduring impulses are unearthed from the sediments of technology and time.

Atlas of Green marks a shift for Dialect towards more rustic and immediate processes of sound making, which emerge in part with new developments in his performance practice, as well as the record’s embrace of malfunctioning physical media and glitching gear. Following a series of live shows in early 2023, the record was created with an assemblage of analogue electronics and acoustic instruments, including scratched records and a broken four track, collaging studio work with recorded live recordings featuring work in progress. Through these interwoven clusters of organic and blemished sound, Dialect reclaims the joyfulness of the inner amateur and creates a soft landing for new seeds of magical possibility – rooted in the bounds and abundance of realism.