High-frequency electronic tone fragments seamlessly elide with crotales and sizzling phantoms, mingling with brisk tempo fragments.
A state is reached in which everything that is heard is mutable
Electronic art for pressing eyes wide open, odd interesting sounds in steadily changing displays. This is not for relaxing, this is intended for active listening, time to hear odd things, which I like to do sometimes. High-frequency electronic tone fragments seamlessly elide with crotales and sizzling phantoms, mingling with brisk tempo fragments. Is that not something which composers have aimed for since Western music first arrived, freedom from encountering a narrow formula mindset of active thesis-antithesis thinking, to create a synthesis?
Given that, we are nevertheless inescapably surrounded by sound. Some of the bits and blips are more or less conventional, but many more have probably been constructed from sampled materials. Whether you are comfortable with avant garde musical exploration and experimentation is likely to depend on your definition of music more generally. Chance decisions might or might not play an important role in many of the compositions. We recognize, categorize, like, dislike what we hear; we wish for more of it; we see resemblances between sound(s). Mystery is real.
We accommodate and place phrases and extracts otherwise starkly disjunct. They remain in our “mind’s ear.” Certain elements are played off against one another, simultaneously and successively. The textures change like the colors in a kaleidoscope, as the music moves in a non-linear way from one idea to the next, all oppositions are dissolved and a state is reached in which everything that is heard is mutable.
Sit straight up in your chair, tighten up your glasses, put on your biggest helmet, keep your floatation devices secure, cinch your belt (or not) and press PLAY.
1. “Paper Clipping” 03:46 — Relentless and fearless moment forms, expressed with willful esotericism, bringing delight into these complexities and different units of music.
2. “Mudita” 04:31 — Cascading skeins of overtone melodies; joy for others’ wellbeing, empathetic joy, joyful compassion, altruistic joy, craving; interlocking quasi-rhythms; arduous listening. Accept the challenge.
3. “Fireflies” 02:29 — Distant moving blinking points of sounds, woody, citric, inside of a floral context, spinning across the hall, with an intense hidden climax.
4. “Lus Us” 04:43 — Sometimes fluent, occasionally intense with flair and an impressive clarity.
5. “Web of Time” 04:30 — The frequencies vary throughout the track, the pace is relentless. What I hear is a series of tones in an ordered arrangement without regard for traditional tonality, or instrumentation, reminiscent postwar avant garde, fluent and relaxed, slowly approaching what might be a conclusion, only to find thin air. Perfect.
6. “Butterefly Inkwell” 05:27 — Fragments of several of the melodies are also quoted in the same popular era, half-lit in the deep hues with no tonal centre, leaving the outcome very much up to chance, various rates of acceleration and deceleration oppose one another.
7. “Shade Without Shadow” 07:29 — Beautifully crafted in the total serial language, nearly abandoning an underlying overtone melody in the wispy clicks. I basked in the diffusion of perfumes, and felt the music take on a new aspect.
8. “Obelisk Teeth” 04:13 — Worlds away a leading light of gestural grandiloquence, far more than the sum of its parts.
9. “Lighghthouse” 03:16 — There is much we do not understand, the sound of this track works in between moments of uncertainty, crisis, intuition, and hope. The watchtower beacon is strong, a tall and prominent presence in the fog of a melancholic seemingly many-faceted sound-world.
10. “The Blood of That Beautiful Bird” 02:30 — There is a logic, or several competing logics perhaps. The tapestry which these sounds create is itself anything but a random collection of sounds, a little insane, maybe even a little irresponsible, but also painstakingly constructed and, in the end, magnificent to behold. It is energy, it is consciousness, clicks, smacks and rapid tones that, ethereal and impossible to locate, get under your skin — and perhaps makes a case for music’s ability to awaken your bones, tickle your consciousness, and take hold of your ears.
11. “Snowdrift” 03:21 — We all want to experience something new, something fresh. And that’s what the listener of this production of a series of small, individually characterized units might find here, awash in a soft light, with individual notes and durations, one after the other, in the frozen night sky.
12. “Tunneling Under the Structure Till It Falls” 04:44 — Deep in the basement there are strange things happening. You might not be able to dance to it, the mystery of the whisperer commands the outcome. Textures and combinations of sound progress and clang and ring and finally eases off into a state of mind that defines success. I think it works.
Chad Mossholder of Twine (Ghostly, Hefty, Komplott, BiP_HOp) is a sound designer for video games like Everquest, DC Universe Online and Doom (2016), Doom Eternal (2020) and Doom Eternal: The Ancient Gods – Part One (2020).
Lighghthouse is available on Schematic. [Bandcamp]
