(February 2010) The sound of piano, both pure and processed, has become almost a sub-genre of its own within ambient electronica. There’s a Satie-authored lineage stretching from Budd/Eno through to Sakamoto’s collabs with Alva Noto and Fennesz, with signs to other off-beat sites – whether the sunken grandeur of Aloof Proof and Andrew Liles, or the warmer homefires of such as Goldmund, Peter Broderick and Library Tapes. Against this backdrop we find Matthew Cooper, moonlighting from his Eluvium dayjob, communing with Charles Buckingham on a project dubbed Concert Silence – a recording captured then released, originally as a free website download. Word had hardly spread among ambience-chasers and Eluvium-spotters before it was withdrawn, taking on a mythical Shangri La-like aspect, to be ever-pursued – spoken of with a faraway wistful look. But now, thanks to the good auspices of Infraction, their initiative to issue a full CD version of 09.22.07 [2-3pm] means there need be no more unrequited yearning.
Buckingham’s background in visual art makes his contribution to Concert Silence somewhat enigmatic – though he had previously coopted Cooper for the audio of an online ambient audio-visual collab in the Window Exchange project; Cooper’s signature is clearly recognisable, for all that the pianisms of his earlier Eluvium work are tweaked and tampered with here. This is reportedly an unedited recording of a basement session involving the pair captured during the eponymous time, and configured into six discrete movements. It’s an affair of somewhat edgy, even perturbed, though not perturbing, ambience, with lilting lulling passages ceding to digital depredations, some parts subtly infiltrated, others strewn with the detritus of error-smithery. “Part Two,” for example, sounds as if it’s slowly spontaneously combusting in the player, gradually growing into a larger conflagration, culminating in a veritable firework display of pops, crackles and wayward woozy pitchshifts, eating itself in echo and fuzz, before returning to the opening lull of barely audible soft-pedalled piano purism. “Part Three,” too, finds its plain three-note motif gradually effaced with arcing infusions of manipulated keys into a blur of shimmering tintinnabulation. Before this, the set’s opening, an elegant elliptical two-chord theme, is slowly preyed upon, its graceful steps mischievously tripped by trails of reversed notes and bubbling static. “Part Four” starts out as if on the wind-blasted deck of a ghost ship, several minutes passing before a quasi-classical progression drifts in, and a slow seepage of shadow resonances slowly fills the soundfield. On “Part Five” the piano shifts from grand to electric, a stately figure progressively inundated by randomly pitchshifting echoes and digital dust over a flimsy faded drone-bed. On the final “Part Six” the purity of the piano returns with accretions of elegiac vamping chords, though here, as throughout, source sounds have their tones smeared, pushed and pulled into delay-drenched trills, here in lone reflection, there cascading over the vapour trails left by another.
Overall the Cooper-Buckingham pairing puts a distinctive slant on the compositional tradition mentioned above, finding a beguiling blend of the worlds of piano concerto and that of digital signal processing, with its random reversals, glitch flurries, and drone disrupts – as if signal had met with noise and this were a record of the effecting of a jumpy truce. Yet, for all its peculiarities of pitch and microsonic mist, strong melodic lines serve as binding, stitching the glitch snippets, lending poise to noise. And with further playthroughs, 09.22.07 [2-3pm] reveals itself to be possessed of a strange enchantment, its tropes of post-digitalism transformed from an initial semi-autistic aspect to a freeplay of poststructuralist jouissance.
09.22.07 [2-3pm] is forthcoming on Infraction Records.
