The genesis of The Foundry’s latest collaborative effort is titled Bibimbap after
the Korean dish. Bibimbap simply means “mixing rice” and entails mixing whatever
ingredients are at hand in a stone bowl and, over the course of the meal as the bowl
is used and reused, the end result takes on a flavor of the entire process. The
ingredients at hand for this melange are fragments of tracks, unfinished ideas,
melodies cut from other pieces, and other scraps of unrealized work. Tossed
together in a common pot, these sonic oddments are used by each artist on the
compilation as the source material for their own piece. What lay fallow and unused
for one artist became the core idea for another; what was cut for time or thematic
drift became an active element in another composition, afforded a different emphasis
based on the new artist’s interpretation.
Ben Swire opens Bibimbap with “Amalgam,” a swirling ambient piece with looped
rhythms and tiny glitch beats. The tiny percussion crackles and sparks like a
miniature strobe light set to some arcane mathematical sequence. Bells and timpani
vie for your attention in a very unobtrusive manner. “Amalgam” doesn’t intrude, it
is a rhythmic ambience which will open its arms to you if you want to dive into its
layered complexity, but it isn’t pushy with its affection. Saul Stokes offers
“Cyclops Afternoon,” a track of heat miasma rhythms, vaguely High Desert in texture
and tone, vaguely deep space radio in its particular signals and vaguely artesian in
its bubbling rhythms.
Forrest Fang’s “Filling the Bowl” continues the bubbling effervescence initiated by
Stokes, though here it is stronger, more urgent, becoming something greater as if
the persistent sound of bubbling water was actually something else, some other
sequence of tones (bells, perhaps, slow marimbas even) that has been manipulated by
the clever hand of the ambienteer. M. Bentley’s “The Twilight Pageant” hangs on the
back of a slow echo from a bowed gong, a diaphanous construct hanging behind a trio
of gentle guitar, breathy wooden flute, and light touch against a solitary drum. As
a parade at nightfall, this one is luxurious and deliberate, passing like the slow
descent of flower petals in the fall. Earwicker’s “Entree” vanishes in a plume of
boiling water, buoyed up into space by the vaporizing liquid until it becomes a mix
of space dust, water vapor and stellar static.
In “Kimchi Tastes of Summer” Chris de Giere uses a wide brush to paint a canvas of
tones and then turns to a series of small brushes to dot into the foreground a
popping, erupting melody of hiccuping sound. Thermal’s “Muse of Expiration” evolves
like an expanding star cluster, each successive wave of matter denser and more
complex than the previous one: after the light arcs of shimmering gong echoes come
the tiny bell melodies, the looping analog poetry of synthesizer melodies and,
finally, the solidifying particles of percussion. Dean Santomieri’s “Their Hearts
Burst The Bars But Their Necks Broke Against The Glass” is both the noisiest and
shortest of the bunch, eschewing the deep space ambience and the pastoral water
music of the previous tracks for lurching bursts of static and the resonant rumble
of subterranean trolls beneath a prickly transmission of tonal shards as if he is
collapsing every element from the pool into a single crystallized snack.
This core group call themselves the Archipelago, latching onto the idea that while
musicians may be solitary islands operating in a distinct vacuum from other artists,
they do eventually become aware of other islands near them and send out exploratory
boats. Lines of trade and communication open up between these solitary spaces and,
for these musicians, the communication is all about collaborating with each other,
constantly looped and editing themselves in an effort to discover new ways to look
at the same material. They engage themselves in their efforts at making music and
they reward the listener who does the same. Bibimbap is a great example of the many
different ways that the sum can be greater than the individual parts and is a warm
introduction to the aesthetic of The Foundry label.
Bibimbap is out now on Foundry Records.
