Liminal is an epithet normally associated with the avant end of electronic experimentalism, like the lowercase abstractions of Steve Roden or the near-silent studies of Bernard Günter. But this is a different Liminal, one that skirts the perimeters of melody and harmony, albeit without immersion.
[Release page] Make like Blake, take the doors of perception, and their threshold is the liminal (from limen (Lat.), for the etymological trainspotter); a psychological state of being in between different existential planes (nods to the neuro-psychos). Transposed to a musical context, that this in-betweenness might adumbrate the subject’s senses or the object’s sound is a duality that fuels Pascal Savy’s Liminal. A set of four slow flow tone poems on new-ish netlabel, FeedbackLoop, it’s only FL’s second physical release (after lead Loop-man Leonardo Rosado’s own Opaque Glitter); in terms of Savy’s trajectory, it comes off the back of his The Silent Watcher (Audiomoves), a promising debut, albeit one falling a tad too comfily in line with a lately fossilizing new wave of ambient drone.
Liminal is an epithet normally associated with the avant end of electronic experimentalism, like the lowercase abstractions of Steve Roden or the near-silent studies of Bernard Günter. But this is a different Liminal, one that skirts the perimeters of melody and harmony, albeit without immersion; it also gestures, however obliquely, towards an emotional hinterland, while remaining somehow at a remove, with explicit allusions to ‘themes of solitude, loss of self and journey towards recovery – an inbetween where the sense of identity slowly dissolves into new forms.’ Opening Savy salvo places an organ-like tonemass in space, then a creep of bass, and a seep of higher pitched elements into “Falling Inward” in a kind of halation effect of spectral arrays of notes half-forming into barely-there figures. A somewhat sombre mood that was apparent but more diffuse on the earlier The Silent Watcher is here pervasive, the other three pieces being of similar design. The four share needles, elements drawn from synths, piano, oboe, and field recordings bleeding into one another in hermetic drone miniatures of gently thrumming timbrality; the soundstage is sprinkled with granular dust, field infusions folded in with resonances abstracted, particulate motifs smeared across uneasily populated drone beds. “Reflective Shadow,” teeming with wood-pigeon coos, footsteps, knocks, has piano and synth stabs surface and submerge; then there’s plectrum pluck, oboe squeak, slow semitonal trickles bearing discreet harmonics. “Transference,” a shiver of timbres and increasingly atonal incursions, likewise awash with environmental effluvia. On the final “Lying/Drifting” a simple minor chord is spread out, and a rattle and hum and near-constant crackle of microphone noise and chthonic rumble run through it. Throughout liquid motions coalesce as if into something solid, but never quite crystallize.
Overall, Liminal finds Savy settling into a less studied style, if a less winning way; there’s an interesting kind of occlusion at work, both in the reduced tonal range within which it operates, and the manner in which sonorities are projected – as if snatches, sketches, shadowplay glimpses in passing rather than in-focus well-lit close-ups. It’s ambient-drone, Jim, but… not that it’s not as we know it, more that its microsound fields are coloured with a certain ambiguity – a nervous languor, a creeping serenity that, within an increasingly populous tradition, suggests Savy might have found a quiet corner of his own.
Liminal is available on FeedbackLoop. [Release page]
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