Stills Lit Through is what metal sculpting would sound like, if it could sing with each fall of the hammer, each bend under the torch, cold rolled steel round stock naked, skinny and gnarled as branches on a winter elm.
Stills Lit Through is what metal sculpting would sound like, if it could sing with each fall of the hammer, each bend under the torch, cold rolled steel round stock naked, skinny and gnarled as branches on a winter elm. In fact, Tallesen (born Cayman Johnson in New York’s Hudson Valley, currently residing in the city), who is also a visual artist (he painted the striking cover art, credited under another name) alludes to this, calling this first collection of sound works a response to the “continuous flexibility of the physical setting by the additive of sound.”
A carillon of influences is hinted at on Stills Lit Through, IDM, bass, vaporwave (Software is of course the label of Daniel Lopatin) cubist electronica (the wonderful meccanoscape of “Landmark Rituals”) and even détourned calypso (“Strike Silver, Love Green,” “Line Cross Shore”). Perhaps also not uninfluenced by Brian Eno’s rattlier work, like Nerve Net, as well as dance, action painting, all movement that is neither metronomic nor chaotic. The movement of a mensch, not a mensch-maschine, one of flesh and blood sweating into his work. Track titles bear this out, peppered with active verbs—motion, take, flash, seize, strike, cross, bloom.
In an interview Tallesen iterates that he causes “suggested form but not complete form,” rendered fluidly coherent as an album by the “intensity throughout,” triggered by emotional or intellectual encounters with physical places and things. As such, it is a profoundly palpable portfolio of work, a house-sized jungle gym built to accommodate the landscape. There is wild irregularity in its rhythms, like that of nature. Only mankind can imagine a perfect circle, but only by nature can a circle be created, which, though imperfect, is perfect by coming into being, because nothing is more perfect than that which has been created.
Tallesen’s debut is an enriching listening experience. The CD and digital versions contain four extra tracks, and you want to hear them. Software have also released an EP of remixes you’ll want to hear, too, each guest artist alighting on a judiciously chosen moment to provide a little extra, subjective illumination. His bound-to-sound-nothing-like-the-first-album Inca has just been released.
Stills Lit Through is available on Software.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgfSj1mrqJc
