Pictureplane Releases New LP 'Technomancer,' Touring with HEALTH

Pictureplane, the moniker for Travis Egedy's electronic production project, just dropped his new full-length LP entitled Technomancer. The Brooklyn-via-Detroit multimedia artist's album was released via Anticon over the weekend and is available to stream via the label's Soundcloud. Next week, Pictureplane will join HEALTH as they embark on their Death Magic North American Tour. Check out their tour dates listed below at the end of this article. Watch the video for the title track, below.

The new album follows the artist's 2011 Thee Physical. As stated in the label's introduction to the release, "Technomancer was recorded across three years in Egedy's garage, then finished in proper studios in New York and Los Angeles." In that time, the artist was also touring with artists like Major Lazer and Crystal Castles. One glance at his neon Curriculum Vitae on his website shows how busy he was during that four-year studio hiatus exhibiting his visual artwork, in which Egedy explores similar themes as he does in his Pictureplane project, in galleries across the globe.

As Fact Mag points out, the new album shares its name with a poem on Egedy's website entitled "Thee Necromancer Manifesto (AKA Dimensional Rip 9)." In the manifesto, the artist proposes the idea of becoming a magical cyborg "in which we are our own machines."

Upon first listen, the album sounds exactly like what one would guess from its title. If a necromancer is a sorcerer who communicates with the dead, then a technomancer is a wizard who communicates with, or manipulates, technology. Think of Adam Sandler's character in Click, who uses a remote control to change reality, set it to a dark and dreamy industrial-pop soundtrack, and you've got a pretty accurate description of the vibes Pictureplane is working with on his latest release.

The statement accompanying the release explains that the tracks "Self Control" and "Live Forever," which both feature Skin Town's Grace Hall, "deal with a controversial future that may already be upon us: where reality, even mortality, is able to be engineered," citing the works of Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock as sources of inspiration. The rest of the album seems to draw on similar themes while musically embracing scraps of darkwave, 80s EBM and 90s house. One album highlight is the chaotic noise-house track entitled "Riot Porn," which has received the most plays in the few days since the album first dropped.

Listen to Technomancer below: