Each composition on Rust Smudges progresses ever so gradually, filling space while suspending time.
Moments ossified into colossal blocks of sound
Tim Story is a composer who taught himself to create ambient music using synthesizers in the 1970s, inspired by the European electronic music of the time. Since his debut 1982 album, In Another Country, he has carved out a space in the drone/new-age-adjacent scene: releases on Windham Hill and Hearts of Space, collaborations with Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius, and even some work scoring TV programs and films. Rust Smudges is a little bit like a self-remix album. It uses, as its source material, Story’s 1987 album Wheat and Rust and subjects it to a process he calls “smudging,” which he has refined over three previous volumes (to be precise, “Rust Smudges I” and Rust Smudges III” exist, but I can’t find reference to the second instalment.)
The idea of “smudging” is to take one of his previous recordings, pinpoint one moment of it, then build a full composition out of that instant of sound—a process of “freez[ing] those moments into stately progressions of harmony and timbre,” as Story tells it. I suppose it’s a little like using the eyedropper tool in Adobe Photoshop, which samples the color of one specific pixel in an image file so that you can use that hue exclusively. In the case of Rust Smudges, Story reduces the lovely, variegated sounds of his previous album into two rich 23-minute drones—moments ossified into colossal blocks of sound. I don’t want to leave you with the impression that each track is a single synthesizer chord drawn out to infinity, though: each composition on Rust Smudges progresses ever so gradually, filling space while suspending time.
Review by: Martijn Comes / Vital Weekly #1358. Reprinted with permission.
Rust Smudges is available on Dais. [Bandcamp | Site]
