Artifacts of Affection

There are things love leaves behind before it has even gone: warmth in a chair, a changed route through a room, a melody one person has taught another to anticipate. Artifacts of Affection is Iria’s record of those objects and reflexes. Its piano is close enough to hear the mechanism; its electronic pulse behaves less like a machine than a second nervous system.

The album begins in “Warm Static,” where contact is already becoming transmission, and gradually lets affection alter the reliability of everything around it. An afterimage changes colour. A heartbeat becomes sidechain. Memory leaks into the present. Yet the record refuses to treat tenderness as naïveté. “Light Finds a Way” and “Marry Me” are not ironic titles. Iria allows the promise to remain beautiful even when the companion album is waiting beside it.

Artifacts of Affection and Residual Phase were made as one work and issued together. Hear this one first: the warm exposure, eight tracks long. Then turn toward the image after the light.

Written, performed and produced by Iria. Released by Third Rail as TR-007.