The man never fails to delight the mind’s eye and ear to match, whether using his trusty feedback machines or ripping out the very innards of a whole host of modular devices, synths, and other mysterious noisemakers.
Testing the malleability of sound
Myers has been pushing at the boundaries of electronic music for longer than some folks have been alive, and his continuing explorations within such variegated arenas serve to excite and regularly illuminate the more mundane aspects of existence. Most of this is due to the fact that Myers, whether under his given name or as his longtime alter ego Arcane Device, is that true restless spirit, endlessly innovating, endlessly searching, plumbing the depths of technology like a dogged sonic archaeologist to forever unearth something at once unknown yet new. He’s been on quite the tear during these last isolationist, lockdown years, releasing what seems to be a CD every few months or so, but damn if not every single one is worthy of your time and coin. The man never fails to delight the mind’s eye and ear to match, whether using his trusty feedback machines or ripping out the very innards of a whole host of modular devices, synths, and other mysterious noisemakers.
Here, on his second CD release on the ever-reliable Crónica label (itself a fine source of contemporary electronic and experimental music of all stripes), Myers finds the ideal home, where his knack for testing the malleability of sound is paramount, and the realization of his ideas is rendered sacrosanct to the ear. His description of this latest missive is that of Time Displacement Music, and such a sobriquet is more than apt; experiencing the fluctuating tonal qualities of these four lengthy pieces does seem to suspend any and all chronological means.
Temporal shifts seem to occur ::
Indeed, while diving headfirst into the oscillating length of expansive tundra that is the opening “Equability of Powers,” temporal shifts seem to occur, as your ear gets fully digested by Myers’s itinerant whooshes, whoops, and hollers, until you realize that the piece’s many-splendored tones, chiming and ringing like machinistic marimbas, have held you spellbound for its full nineteen minutes. “Iniquities” vibrates in less strident fashion, but don’t let its lugubrious undertow deceive you—under waves of somewhat mordant gestures, where dank atmospheres recalling Tangerine Dream’s ancient Zeit motifs unfold, noisier tones ebb, achieve a gorgeous luminosity, then subside below the sheer gravitational weight of their own making. The index of metals that pulses throughout “With Perfect Clarity” seeks to resolve some opaque narrative as it courses through the veins, but, like the quicksilver properties of mercury, finds its own precious level while navigating the body corpus, a river of syrupy textures hardening into a modular musique concréte.
The finale, “Yet Another Shore,” harkens back to the sharp, crystalline formations found on the album’s opener, as Myers’ rubs and massages his potentiometers to yield suspension and displacement on a grander scale. As the tones seem to vividly enlarge, explode, and disintegrate in the track’s closing moments, it’s as if you’ve witnessed the aftermath of the big bang itself, the kaleidoscopic fallout of delay turning all the attendant loops, fizzes, and tremolos into a temporal warping of the senses. Brilliant.
Strange Attractors is available on Crónica. {Bandcamp]
