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Limited edition 140g LP pressed at Gotta Groove.

Includes unlimited streaming of Patio User Manual via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. "A compelling collection of low-key, quietly buzzing ambient compositions." – Shawn Reynaldo/First Floor

"Patio User Manual evokes a glazed stare at a landscape out of reach but always present. An evening after a day of having your brain flooded with information, perhaps. Sitting outside, your mind so worn it can’t focus on one thing. Encased but somehow open to the world. Not quite disassociating, but wandering deeper into the mist of what’s around. It’s disquieting, but captivating."
– Daryl Worthington/The Quietus

"In 'The Chemistry of Dirt,' one of the album’s highlights, bursts of static establish a rapid-fire pulse against glowing chords; buzzing noises twist and bumble their way across the stereo field like beetles scuttling through the soil, their shells glinting against black loam. Beneath its muted surface, it’s a remarkably vivid and pictorial piece of music. It feels like a reminder that the patio is a gateway to realms seldom considered: Step beyond the edge of your suburban deck, and a hidden universe teems with life, right beneath your feet."
– Philip Sherburne/Pitchfork

On his third album as Etelin, Alex Cobb explores the intricacies of separation and belonging using field recordings and electronics, reconfiguring the dividing line between what is artificial and natural in the process. Maintaining a sense of playful reverence and lurking melancholy in its glitchy pastoralism, Patio User Manual hums with a meticulous and singular energy. From the loops and static pulses of "The Chemistry of Cobalt" to the tension and release of "Electrical Sailing," the listener is pulled into a sound world at once ambivalent and radiant, reaching its denouement in the lovely melody that closes the final track, "Picnic at Gas Station Park".

Although the album might bring to mind the nuanced and imaginative ambient music published by labels such as Mille Plateaux, Sonig, and Silent Records in the 1990s, it is, in the end, a world of its own and very much of today. The patio as a stage for alienated life, pyrrhic in its isolation, deceptive in its promise of distinction. Orientation as disorientation, often unseen inside the frame but felt in the bones. What is out there, anyway, other than the thing we fear the most?

Watch the video for "The Chemistry of Cobalt": https://youtu.be/hVSQoNfYXAA

"Another day of weird weather and screens. What type of perfume did Philip Johnson wear when he designed Glass House? Is it actually possible to flee to the country when you’ve internalized a lifetime of intellectualized urban living? When you buy a DIY patio kit, you get instructions for how best to embed concrete or brick or flagstone into the natural world. The patio will make you enjoy your environment more. It will become yours. You can stand on it and think “this is Mine.” The structuralists talked about the importance of fixed camera position, but didn’t properly interrogate it because to do so would be impossible. It’s hard to believe that it really wasn’t long ago that computer music seemed exciting, novel, even radical. We’re now thoroughly estranged from eating what’s in season. Walking around the woods in southern Ohio in spring, I thought about the curious imperative of the patio, how my kids get excited about picking oyster mushrooms, the dynamics of switched capacitor filters, and how adequacy is tethered to doubt." - AC, May 2024

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