‘From the more visible we must turn now towards the increasingly less visible which is also most revealing and most true’ (Philippe Jaccottet, Landscapes with Absent Figures)
Quote from Invisible Birds, purveyors of hand-packaged ltd. ed. wares ‘evocative of memory, transcendence, birds, landscape, and nothingness.’ We’re told ‘forms of memory, nothingness and the sublime may include: birdsongs, twitters, chirps, calls – wing flutters and movements – the correspondence of birdsongs and their environment – abstractions, beauty.’
What forms of memory, nothingness and the sublime bring us here are included in Keith Berry‘s Elixir. For the non-adept, Dronemeister Berry has previous (long) form—The Golden Boat (2003) for Bernhard Günter’s Trente Oiseaux, one of his great inspirations, followed by Buddha’s Mile (Authorized Version, 2004), The Ear That Was Sold To A Fish (Crouton, 2005), A Strange Feather (Twenty Hertz, 2005), The Cartesian Plain (Elevator Bath, 2010), and Towards the Blue Peninsula (Infraction, 2013). Four years on he renews his trademark modus operandi: a myriad of moments of sound assembled over time to be alchemized through his soft ware and tear into a texture mash of the ineffable–a soup of particulate fragments in brownian motion seen as if through a white noise veil darkly, illumined by glimmering effects. Elixir draws on the same source sounds as soon-come S I M U L A C R A (Infraction), Berry disposed to indulge ‘a different take on material that had a strong pull on me, wanting me to return to it and explore the permutations that digital editing software allows.’
Common provenance, different destinations. An inquiry grounded in grain and gauze; here sounds are more hermetic, longer in assimilation. A lyrical melancholy prevails, eschewing maudlin, mawkish or miserabilist.
Elixir is available on Invisible Birds.
