In my mind’s eye, Purity Hall is a gigantic, marble-clad, spiritual space, not unlike a modernist re-imagining of the Taj Mahal, and Purity Hall is the sound wafting through it, whichever corner you turn. But for its creator, it is the “musical application of mathematical techniques” drawing inspiration from concepts of theoretical chemistry.
Franck Condon is Wim Dehaen, a Belgian currently residing in the Czech Republic. The five pieces recorded for this album are each around twelve minutes long and were created “by intensive spectral processing of varied sound sources.” Track titles “Deceptive Simplicity” and “Equilibrium Unfolding” suffice to characterize the result of what he declares as two functions producing a third, which in plain terms sounds to me like plain old looping and phasing.
Gorgeous exercises in taste and restraint, each track is a pressurized air drone, ambiented with pastel-colored perfume in a mere puff or squeezed agonizingly through rickety bellows. In thinking about form, full mastery of the core seems to follow effortlessly. Purity Hall is an angel of a record. They always said heaven could be explained with math, they never told us it could also be achieved.
Purity Hall is available on Runningonair Music.
