The latest from the esteemed Greyfade records out of those United States.
What we have here is described as ‘post-glitch’, which is fairly appropriate — where initial waves of glitch music reconditioned technology failures into the sonic palette, this is working in a realm a lot less rhythmically stratified than, say, Oval — but equally a lot less erratic than Yasunao Tone. Like all the Greyfade releases I’ve heard, it has the distinct quality of feeling composed — as in, it appears to have a form and motion — but equally has elements of improvisatory chaos that are unnerving and compelling.
The sound world here drifts between jumping ambient ‘drones’ (or just held tones), lush noisy textures (in the realm of needles on dirty records or the fuzz of a bad audio connection). What reliably appears as melodic content (eg the piano on track three) doesn’t stick around long enough to dominate, so the whole is a — dare I say — pretty but disconcerting melange of electronic elements that veer between noise and rhythm. It’s certainly not the kind of textural play of musique concrète or noise, but it’s also not so sedate as to qualify as ambient music.Incidentally, all the tracks have either ⊏ or ⊐ as the title — the former denoting a relationship between two mathematical objects, the latter presumably meaning its inversion (which is also to imply non-equity between the two). Given that there’s no subject / object to make that make sense, then the titles are presumably entirely abstract. Top marks for finding those lesser-used ASCII codes Greyfade. Here’s one of the unicode entries if you’re interested.
These four discs being a collaboration between Jozef Dumoulin and (Greyfade impressario) Joseph Branciforte lends it a peculiar quality — no sense which voice is which, but distinctly the sense of holism about the tracks. Track 7 (⊏), which appears to be haunted by a motorbike engine, is exemplary — touches of bending and brittle melodies and a clear narrative building in the music (a cloud of distortion ultimately takes over) has the sense of drama, but not the rhythmic regularity to stop being unsettling. If it’s ambient music, it’s peculiarly disturbed ambient music.So here we are with another Greyfade that sticks a flag in twenty-first century composition / experimental music and claims its odd territory. Still one of the labels to watch, pals.
-Kev Nickells-
