Composer/producer Rob Shelton, who has worked with John Vanderslice and Luke Temple,  has announced, his new album Eight Lines/The Seer, will come out on May 1st. The release is both a tribute to one of the greats in American composing, Steve Reich. LA-based Shelton involved musicians in the Bay Area, his home until recently, to play the piece exclusively on synths, keyboards, and piano. His homage to one of America’s greatest experimental composers flows beautifully into “The Seer,” a longform meditative composition of Shelton’s that could be the soundtrack to the gentler comedown of an eruptive psychedelic awakening. Ahead of the release, Shelton has given listeners a taste of the album, with the track “Opening.”

Rob Shelton on “Opening”:

“Opening” is inspired by walks through the open oak woodlands of California’s rolling coastal hills. It was created largely from contorting sounds from their original source, layering multiple sounds over each other to create incidental rhythms and melodies.”

For the album,  Shelton brought togrther his his wife, Meernaa frontwoman Carly Bond,  Stephen Steinbrink and Rose Droll. Shelton’s own intimate mastery of synths, including the Moog Minimoog, Prophet 5, and Oberheim OB-8 shines throughout as well. “With ‘The Seer,’ it’s taken me a really long time to get to a point where I feel that it’s ready to be released. Hearing ‘The Seer’ in the context of the other music I’ve been producing made it feel like it was the right time,” he explains.