It’s abstract art, patterns and shapes.
Emerge’s Frown is a scowl of ambient, an extended session spent deep in thought. Imagine The Thinker by Rodin, straining for insight, scouring the far reaches of his mind’s universe, until, like the third track, his mind explodes into a foundary, forging new stars, new globes in bursts of glowing, volatile magma.
Together with Holzkopf, Emerge creates a space oddity of synthesizer and processing, a noise diptych, two satellites trying to overcome their differences by harmonizing their signals. On “Masonry,” they often find the same wavelength, and beautiful music results, but radio waves are unwieldy in a vacuum and a lot of fine tuning is necessary. It gets pretty rough about twenty minutes through, then it gets really quite sweet. Then they bump into each other. And then, they power down.
“Metallurgy,” the second half-hour piece comprising Craft, begins in the space left behind by the satellites, very quiet, small ripples in its fabric until actual metal is struck. Sonars seek, trains run along their tracks and are turned into the gravel beneath the ties, machines attempt to reboot, a quiet zoop-zoop-zoop-a sounds like a George Thorogood blues might be revving up. Chains rattle, metal fatigues, a sinkhole tries to suck in all the debris, it resists. An altogether opaque opus. It’s abstract art, patterns and shapes. Up to us to find it aesthetically rewarding.
Both releases are available on Attenuation Circuit.
