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Clay Ruby, "Astral Resin Worm #1"
Burial Hex and Zodiac Mountain main man Clay Ruby drops the first part of a three volume trip into analogue synth research (an early '70s PAIA 4700 modular synth kit for the trainspotters out there). Somewhere between a key to a parallel neighborhood of headspace and dissident meditative headphone music, this 45 minute piece is more like being transported to a physical place rather than an aural journey.
There isn't much in the way of heavy musical movements here; there are no radical or interrupting introductions of sounds across the single piece of worn electric noise. The piece isn't sedentary by any stretch of the imagination, its layers move at the speed of a slug's shrug. Played as background music or without a suitable spell of concentration, its rewards are mostly impenetrable. But through immersion in its roar the short-lived and slowly dissolving higher shifts of sound become clear. Its seemingly simple structure belies the focus, concentration and involvement that it took to create something this cavernous.
There is also a visual aspect to the music, a huge force blocking the horizon while it plays, the sound's pores filling the air with grey macadam. Ruby's experiments have caught a field recording from a place that never was: a sound deep in the back of his head. Still, Clay Ruby isn't present or apparent on the track, the music remaining resolutely 'ego-less'. Feeling like a great wide daub of naught across the senses, there is nothing elegiac or sinister about the Astral Resin Worm #1’s matter.
