Experimental Electronic Music
A collection of cameos rendered in feathery tones and dusty pitches by Todd Gautreau aka Tapes and Topographies, Plumage’s sonorities, languorously looping and limned in treated effluvia, point to timbral and spatial elements as its primary zone of sonic inquiry.
A quarter of a century on from optimal.lp’s release, then, its timelessness is still palpable, even enhanced, with the reissue’s addition of three tracks made while working on it, plus a new take on the closing “Tank” (digital only): in prepping the reissue, running one of the masters through a customized reverb unit, he began recording the outcome of this haptic past-inside-the-present dialog.
Characterized as “10 tracks of technoblues,” Oizys, the album, follows very much in the vein of the previous Shrapnel, a lowlight minimal variant redolent of some early ’00s Berlin-inflected dub-tech/tech-dub releases.
All in all, this personal take on the quiet details concept exhibits a deftly turned lower-case sound design prowess that bespeaks years of audio craftsmanship, constituting a compelling entry to a growing catalog.
The modular maven channels something of an early TD sound-feel via post-Kosmische textures, motifs, and rhythms; new projections in the head cinema, strangely familiar, yet otherworldly.
Double review for zakè’s B⁴+3 (Zakè Drone) and zakè & Benoît Pioulard’s eve (Past Inside The Present)—proceeding to windblown drones and bells tintinnabulating across the sound field.
What follows constitutes, for want of time for exhaustive description, a representative sample of some of the year’s rich late harvest…
Otherworldly yet strangely familiar, sometimes sounding oddly more organic than electronic, at once beauteous and mysterious, huge and delicate.
Like an extended gaze on the infinite, or the sound of chronostasis, Ash is motion felt at a Brownian micro-level of timbre and harmonic shift.
Zahn, though, never lets any innovation imperative efface the musicality at the heart of the matter; his compositions lie on a cline between minimalism and sound design in a melodic ambient zone…
