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Christopher Bissonnette, "Periphery"
Bissonnette's compositionsburn slowly and coldly, not because the record is particularlyunwelcome nor is it difficult to listen to, but his sound choices areundeniably of the modern age.
Thinkbox founder and digital arts renaissance man ChristopherBissonnette has spent a large portion of his career working at theintersection of video, art, music, and performance. Throughout the 90'she worked in a variety of ways with media and art installations and hasproduced compilations and albums with other Thinkbox members.Appropriately his solo debut, Periphery,is a digital flood of an album, arranged as though each sound waslayered together one brush stroke at a time. Where other groups and individuals focustheir editing around an organic sound, Bissonnette is happy to allowhis samples to glow with all the electricity that the term "digital"implies.
Although a piano makes an appearance on "In Accordance," themajority of the album thereafter carries a static tone with it, a tonethat creeps by silently with the otherwise warm caress of liquid drift.At times vaguely hidden sine waves dominate the album, shivering andcaught in the ebb and flow of Bissonnette's gentle tempering. Listeningto "Comfortable Expectations" evokes images of a man, wrappedcompletely in dark cloth, sinking slowly to the ocean's bottom, butthere is no terror or fear of suffocation in the music whatsoever.Instead Bissonnette simply paints, creating whole worlds by lettingambiguity rest easily within the variance of his sound choices. Humsstop being purely electric and instead of recall the slow distortion ofsound created by water and, often times those sine waves morph into theunearthly ring of insects buzzing across infinite green fields. As thealbum progresses it moves into darker and darker territory, becomingmore nocturnal and favoring more intricate samples that waver in theirduration. Each sound becomes more infinite, admitting to more variationand reaching symphonic proportions in tense sputters. The finalportions of the album releases the tension that its middle create andposits a cycle; by the time the music has stopped Bissonnette hasmanaged to create a journey of an album, almost conceptual in itsmassive churning.
Where aquatic themes might be said to dominate thecenter of the album, its outer portions are windswept and bright,inspiring images of an oasis and the surrounding desert or mountainousregions sun drenched and clouded by snow. It's a unique piece in aworld of digital music that can sound so alienating. It's carefullyconsidered and well paced, completely defying its digital birth andutilizing its electric power for human weight and imaginative power.
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