Josh Mason’s “Kicking A Dark Horse” Merges Music and Writing on greyfade

What purpose does a physical release still serve? The FOLIO series from greyfade has been building an answer: objects conceived to extend and deepen listening, not merely package it. The third installment, Kicking A Dark Horse by Florida-based sound artist Josh Mason, pushes that idea furthest.

The release pairs a nine-track electronic album with a hardcover book subtitled a nonlinear travelogue of the states of Florida. Mason and the label insist it is a single work, not a multimedia bundle. The book is not liner notes; the music is not a soundtrack. Both are shaped by discontinuity, recursion, and a willingness to let form resist control.

Mason built the album’s pieces around a custom modular framework processing binary data streams. Rather than enforcing order, he embraced the system’s drift. Rhythms misalign, sequences dissolve, fragments return altered. Yet the music never collapses into randomness. A hidden logic guides the bubbling textures and weathered tones, giving tracks like “Unincorporated Community Fight Song” an unstable but coherent life.

The result is a release that demands to be lived with, not streamed and discarded. In a time when music is often treated as ephemeral, Kicking A Dark Horse asserts the physical object as a site of sustained attention.