Autistici :: Amplified Presence (Home Normal)

Using a deceptively simple approach to craft ten music-soundscape vignettes, coaxing emergent melodies from his dual domains of sonority, some set free from particulate wrappers, others given space to wander within rich fields.

[Release info] Following releases on 12K, Keshhhhhh, and his own Audiobulb, David Newman settles down at Home Normal for his third album proper – that is, discounting last year’s clearouts from his Autistici archives. From his debut Newman has pursued a predilection for fusing acoustic and found sounds with a method that seeks to preserve their sonorous essence even through processing and oblique strategies of setting. Of environments, objects, and their sound-generating properties he sings, engineering couplings between found and fabricated, dissolving dichotomies of real/artificial and natural/man-made. Amplified Presence sees Autistici take on the keynote of Volume Objects and follow-up revisit, Complex Tone Test, using a deceptively simple approach to craft ten music-soundscape vignettes, coaxing emergent melodies from his dual domains of sonority, some set free from particulate wrappers, others given space to wander within rich fields.

For the record, this audio treatise’s research tools include a veritable armoury of sounding objects, among which piano, cracklebox, mellotron, cutlery, violin, field recordings, voice. Sonic environments vary, metaphorically, from streams dotted with lightweight driftwood to more densely foliated forestry. Take pretty prelude, “Automated Night Light,” setting the tone, or one of them, with a fragment of lullaby-cum-jingle backed by radio crackle; “Bed of Powdered Glass” brings a completely different noise—a ribbon of slightly grubbily phased and filtered flutter-flitter stretched over arcing and diving string-bass, panned to enhance spatiality, creating a kind of circulatory effect. Note in passing how the electro-acoustic fragments provide architctural as well as melodic anchorage. Amplified Presence’s diversity comes not just from inter-track contrasts, but intra-track phases: “A Religion of Water and Air” has a typewriter spar with a piano-plonk offcut and a plucked string sample, letting them skirmish before throwing in a beat; after which percussive clatter and water dribble, outbreaks of disjunctive wack and wibble conspire in a playfully wonked design that brings Matmos to mind. A harder focus is evident on some pieces, like the similarly Matmospheric “Tower Location,” which conjoins treated bells and field footsteps to a flurry of bleepery and circuitry skronk then morphs them into a thumping technoid workout. “Attachment Type” is another—an oddly unsettled collage in which more bleeps, squidges, and rustles interact to a background of smokebelch and babble. Elsewhere, particularly in the latter stages, a softer sort of electro-pastoral prevails: “Vocal Chords” abstracted into a pensive floating keyboard interlude, lyrical koto (harp? inside piano?) plucks cascade across “Sixteenth.” Among these, the pleasures of the Eno-like “Slow Rotor Sensory Loop” and the Chartier microsound-like particle mists of the extended “Field” are the most felt. Unlike the frosty removed demeanour of some, these tracks have a peculiar affective heft; perhaps your mood mileage may vary as Newman’s audio narratives of sound-space interplay implicate interior space, each listener thus being acted on and reacting intersubjectively.

Amplified Presence is, then, a journey into sound where space is the place. Newman’s concern with inner-outer world-play focuses on representing details from the natural and man-made world, but moving them into his own world, one in which any detail is ripe for sonic capture and musical release. And in a varied, and variable, set, here frosty there toasty, here sloppy there graceful, Autistici not only displays an acute sensibility for sound and its emplacement, but also affirms a strong individual voice that of an academic acoustician possessed by some ludic child-like spirit.

Amplified Presence is available on Home Normal. [Release info]

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