Dylan Stark – Heartland LP

Heartland is the evocative debut from 24 year old Portland, Oregon resident Dylan Stark. Tropical and immersive the album offers pure, exhilarating escapism. Brimming with sensation, emotion, spontaneity, reflection, and general human-ness this is celebration music.

Created from thousands of samples that Stark brings to life as if conducting an orchestra ‘Heartland’ is a world that he transports the listener through wide-eyed and blissed out. There is an emotional awakening that imbues the album with a joyous aesthetic that seems neither forced nor self-aware, but beautifully ingenuous.

Dylan says “I imagined some other place that always sounded like it was teeming with life, where it always sounded like the world around me was celebrating. I tried to weave this feeling of ecstatic celebration throughout the album, I wanted everything to feel like a parade, like a dense jungle, to give a sort of relaxed, confident, joyous feeling coupled with the distant peace that would come to you when listening to a thunderstorm late at night.”

Heartland is an album about the evocative power of music, and how just a fragment has the ability to open up whole new vistas of the imagination. In a world where the development of countless want-to-be producers is immediately uploaded with the need for instant evaluation and affirmation, Dylan’s quiet patience and confidence has allowed him to create an exceptionally mature debut that is emotional and powerful enough that it doesn’t require any explanation or personality to be attached.

Beyond all the celebration and emotive resonance, “Heartland” is also an album that offers highly sophisticated songcraft and percussive innovation. Opener “Ashen” and closing track “Now” mirror each other, each beginning with minor chord progressions that are later restructured as major progressions and help the listener begin and then return from the albums journey. In “Daydream” a masked 7/4 rhythm and strange time signature of the two chord progression are masked to feel as natural as possible so the track always seems to be moving away from you. It’s all part of Dylan’s conscious desire to create feeling and geography.