Does It Look Like I'm Here? (Expanded Remaster)

by Emeralds

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Andrew Kooyer The centerpiece of this album, really wonderful. Hard to pick this version over the Rehearsal version, but the video did it for me. Favorite track: Genetic.

Adam Gilbert-Cole I wish I could wake every day having never heard this album so I could experience it for the first time again, and again, and again. Favorite track: Genetic.

////////// this album once fundamentally altered who i was as a person and how i lead my life. i was very young, it was a terribly stressful period in my life, and i had never heard anything like it. to this day it is still a reliable escape to a different place for me. it lies very close to my heart. thank you. Favorite track: Summerdata.

B Does It Look Like I’m Here is one of the most surprising records I’ve ever heard. A friend included “Double Helix” on a mix CD he gave to me in the fall of 2010 and ever since Emeralds’ work has been a constant in my life. Elliot, Hauschildt, and McGuire had a direct line into the universe during their final four years as a trio in the late aughts. Every song is a great one, but “Genetic” is especially incredible, a baroque masterwork that’s fallen through a wormhole to 80s Cleveland. Favorite track: Genetic.

EPHEMERALD The title track needs to be sent into space as a memorial for what humanity is capable of accomplishing. One of the best electronic albums of all time. Favorite track: Does It Look Like I'm Here?.

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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
- Vinyl and cassette contain all original remastered tracks, plus a download of all bonus material

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Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
- 2xCD contains full tracklist, including bonus tracks

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Cassette + Digital Album
- Contains Tracks 1-12

Includes unlimited streaming of Does It Look Like I'm Here? (Expanded Remaster) via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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1.	Candy Shoppe 04:43	buy track
2.	The Cycle Of Abuse 04:57	buy track
3.	Double Helix 03:01	buy track
4.	Science Center 04:37	buy track
5.	Genetic 12:06	buy track
6.	Goes By 04:10	buy track
7.	Does It Look Like I'm Here? 07:27	buy track
8.	Summerdata 04:47	buy track
9.	Shade 04:25	buy track
10.	It Doesn't Arrive 03:33	buy track
11.	Now You See Me 03:37	buy track
12.	Access Granted 04:04	buy track
13.	Escape Wheel 06:42	buy track
14.	August (Extended) 08:08	buy track
15.	In Love 03:40	buy track
16.	Lake Effect 03:19	buy track
17.	Genetic (Rehearsal) 28:46	buy track
18.	Does It Look Like I'm Here? (Daphni Mix 1) 08:29	buy track
19.	Does It Look Like I'm Here? (Daphni Mix 2) 06:54	buy track

about

In the late 2000s a sprawling catalog of what is now genre-defining music was emanating from an unlikely place. Cleveland, Ohio has a broad reputation for many things, but in the aughts, psyche-expanding Kosmische wasn’t necessarily Cleveland’s calling card… until Emeralds. The trio of John Elliott, Steve Hauschildt, and Mark McGuire had released a profusion of limited-run cassettes, CD-Rs, and vinyl titles that had been passed around basement shows and then migrated to niche music communities online, creating a unique kind of murmur, even in the height of the DIY blog era. Three kids from the rust belt were crafting a distinctive and truly far-out strain of music on their own terms in the Midwest. They were flipping lids in wood-paneled basements and circulating around the underground with soaring sounds stylistically indebted to deep German electronic music pioneers and released with the ethos and twisted fervor of renegade Midwestern noise freaks. After several releases garnered a die-hard fandom in niche circles of internet/music culture, and then catching the attention of the late Peter Rehberg, the renowned artist and curator of the Editions Mego label, an expectation was set that the next Emeralds record was going to be a big one. And in 2010, Does it Look Like I’m Here? was it.

Artistically, the album is a definitive statement; this is to say it was crafted by heads for heads, a genuine article and a profoundly deep listen, but the mainstream dove in too. Pitchfork acknowledged the rarefied nature of the album’s electricity with a “best new music” rating. This crossover success is a result of the tracks' potency and wonderfully engineered and succinct structures. It’s dialed in. Still creating their distinct yawning cosmic sound, Elliott and Hauschildt shower the stereo spectrum with shimmering arpeggios, dusty, melodically dynamic swells, rippling FM textures, and canyon-wide waveshapes. McGuire’s signature guitar playing echoes emotive new age pathos and cascading astral space rock trance states. Their previous albums found many tracks hovering past the ten-minute mark, but these new songs were short, potent. “Candy Shoppe” opens the album with polished elegance; Emeralds’ throbbing synthetic sound made bite-sized, an incandescent morsel wrapped in waxed paper. On “Goes By” the languid electric guitar strums and swooning synth pads peel apart into enveloping sheets of synth gargling and soaring leads. Both tracks are entire worlds kept neatly under five minutes. If previous albums like Solar Bridge and What Happened were lysergic sprawls, Does It Look Like I’m Here? presents itself as a tin holding a series of psychonautic blasts. This is all to say, the album lived up to the hype.

A twelve-song expedition across a dusty and shimmering dreamscape, Does It Look Like I’m Here?, with its iconic cover presenting the aesthetic, was a radiant tube tv left humming, collecting space-dust in a darkened room, grandma’s vase filled with oil-dinged polypropylene flowers. The album seems aware of the cultural flood/void that the internet was then and would only further create, and yet there is a beauty here, an embracing of the past, both authentically and through a kind of tripped-out kitsch, as a way to find a new ecstatic present. Hallowed pioneers – think Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Temple, Kraftwerk, Can – had felt legendarily out of reach across time and culture; a star-pocked thing of the distant misty past. Emeralds took that
sound and made it contemporary, made it punk, made it American-outsider. Thus, an entire wave of American DIY ambient music was heralded into mid-if-not-mainstream attention; Emeralds, and the acts that followed their lead after, permitted the noise community to embrace more melody and structure, and too invited the quasi-academic world of deep ambient to become crusty and home-spun. DIY venues would suddenly need to make space between droves of scuzzy indie acts or punishing no-input mixer debacles so the ambient zoners could astral project while Emeralds, or groups following Emeralds’ lead, created soundscapes on piles of synths and pedals.

Listening to it now, 13 years after its original release on Editions Mego, the album sounds however timeless, still immediate. There is a wide-pupiled and cotton-mouthed awe sewn into these radiant folds of sound; for those newly into this sort of thing, let this reissue serve as an initiation, a history lesson, and a heroic dose. For those who’ve come up in the scene and have worn out their pirated mp3s of this album; they can finally get a fresh copy on vinyl. Does It Look Like I’m Here? became a hallmark that would carve a path for an entire scene. Ghostly International is thrilled to reissue the album, remastered by Heba Kadry, including 7 bonus tracks exclusive to the digital album and CD. The limited edition 2xLP includes extensive liner notes by Chris Madak (Bee Mask).

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released August 25, 2023

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