Insulary was written, recorded, and compiled entirely remotely. the ep touches on all of our most cherished influences and weaves them into a patchwork of bass music-inspired alt-pop and sentimental, ambiguously forlorn hooks. released on quiet time tapes.
written and recorded from 2017 to 2018 and released on quiet time tapes. QTT8 marks a stylistic turning point for us, at which our production took on a cleaner, more intentional voice.
sample guide and credits: QTT8 saw us move even further from externally sampled materials. being perhaps our most collaborative work to date (that is, with other artists), this release's sample guide expanded on its original concept by merging with the album credits.
written and recorded mostly in 2016. Inconditional is a raw and chaotic collage of plunderphonica interstiched with samples of home-recorded guitar, bass, and drums.
sample guide: compared to previous work, this release realized a deliberate, notable decrease in sampled materials.
The Inaccessibility of Innovation: essay published alongside the album in which we continued to messily explore digital divides in an attempt to thoughtfully contextualize our work, with a critical eye toward our previous writing.
written and recorded from 2015 to 2016. Sent from my iPad is our first full length album, originally released with an essay, sample guide, ten collages, and project files for every song.
sample guide: the first of our varied attempts at attributing our cited works, so to speak. even includes drum samples, which we eventually stopped citing, for reasons unremembered.
Forfeiting Rights in Exchange for Access: the first essay to be featured alongside our music. it came together as we began to think about what it meant to be sampling and exploring the limitations and restrictions of copyright in the context of music industry infrastructure and platform capitalism.
written and recorded in 2015 with xavier arocha. Sent from my iPhone is our first release, an unfiltered amalgam of all our favorite electronic and bass music-adjacent sounds, laced with upcut and recycled youtube samples.
bas relief is the music recording project of david mitchell and william osiecki. formed in 2015 as a result of living and running a record label together, the pair have been collaborators for some twenty years, cutting their teeth in knotty math rock and emo bands.
bas relief is warm, beat loving, breathing, glitch, anti empire, sentimental, bass music, alt pop, montreal, drum & bass, ambient, idm, meditative, electronica, indebted, evolving, influenced by weekend players and clicky fucked up percussion, lacking a plot, verbose, atlanta, for the sake of it, a cruel facsimile of that which we desired most
by day, david books shows for blue skies turn black, a promotion company in montreal, and william works at topshelf records. david is also a founding member of the now defunct band gulfer.
"Bas Relief have none of the trappings of some casual foray into electronic composition—their output is genuinely stellar, subtly baffling in the best way."