The challenging and singular sound textures offered by the duet intuitively explore the dark corners of our imagination, the mnemonic traces of the past, buried and fractured memories.
6&8 is a newly established experimental ambient duet formed in London by the sound designer Rory McCormick and the living poetry artist Jessica Peace. In itself their musical universe reveals a fundamental, sincere and very personal mixture between reflective processed semi-electronic ambiences and empirically based poetries of life. The challenging and singular sound textures offered by the duet intuitively explore the dark corners of our imagination, the mnemonic traces of the past, buried and fractured memories. With abundant sonic proprieties and an absolute lovely sense of communion, those mental soundscapes are a vehicle for an intensifying dialogic inwardness.
I firstly discovered Exercises in Beauty which is a self-digital release strongly connected to Jessica’s very own stylistical and joyful poetical expressions about the existential meaning of life. Rory brings the instrumental sections to accompany and enrich the poetical presence. These are largely made of found sounds, field recordings, guitar tricks, cold static electronic dronescapes and discreet noisy effects. A wonderful cinematic musical orchestration prevails. The approach is intuitive, voluntary reflective, comprehensive and the evocative pieces are sonically intense.
City Plaintive is the newest offering by the duet, built from electronic motives, still pretty absorbing with a prevailing poetical sound aesthetism. Here the musical arguments seem to demonstrate a larger interest for a programmatic, controlled and ritualized interaction between processed acoustic timbres, aleatoric sound manipulations and electronic technologies. City Plaintive is a catalogue of deliciously punchy-pulsating electronic grooves and enthralling floating ambient dreamscapes. The whole album admits an incredible sense of progressiveness and a vast array of sophisticated sound textures. It sounds like an impossible cross between Robert Ashley’s poetical sound environment (Perfect Lives, Private Parts), Aphex Twin (Selected Ambient Works), Bola (Gnayse) with the add of a touching sense of melody. Absolutely mesmerizing, subtle, highly sensitive and meticulously elaborated City Plaintive will ravish fans of illbient, IDM, dream-pop “impressionistic” ambient, vital experimental music and some minimalist based acoustic music.
City Plaintive is available on Xylem. [Release page]
